


The River Answers

by Sylvestris



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Action, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Drama, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Neo-Noir, Suspense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-30
Updated: 2015-05-06
Packaged: 2018-01-21 01:56:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1533416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylvestris/pseuds/Sylvestris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Gus' empire comes apart, Mike and Lydia look for certainty in the ruins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pas de Deux

“Forgive me, Lydia… is something troubling you?”

She can see he’s held onto that question since she arrived. He has waited for her to become receptive, and meanwhile engaged her in the preparation of the meal, and talked about the exhibition he saw recently in Santa Fe, and afterwards led her out onto the veranda, where the cicadas are making a shimmering, oceanic sound. They are close, and not by accident. Gus is deliberate; that’s one of the things Lydia likes about him. Carelessness in others makes her ill at ease, and her own carelessness is intolerable. She came in flustered from heavy traffic and too-bright sunlight and the fraying feeling of not having eaten anything all day (she tried and couldn’t face anything at the airport, it was all cling-wrapped and soaked in preservatives and her hands never feel truly clean there) but now, in her black merino dress, with a sparse arrangement of white flowers set between them and a bolero record playing softly indoors, she feels perfectly contained. She can answer honestly.

“Yes,” Lydia says. “Not so much anything specific, it’s more…” She indicates, with a glance and a gesture, the situation in general. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, but… well, with all that’s been going on, I can’t pretend I haven’t been concerned.”

 _Concerned_ means that she has been checking the locks more often than she needs to, and that last month she sat through a board meeting in the grip of an anxiety attack, taut and straight-backed and driving her nails into her palm. Adrenaline makes her bright-eyed and sharp-edged— her negotiations with Novak in Prague are weeks ahead of schedule, they stand to bring in eight or nine million dollars by the end of the quarter— but she walks a narrowing line between nervous energy and panic these days. Gus understands this without pressing, and lets his measured calmness act as a counterweight.

“The last few months have hardly been the most stable,” he agrees. “I don’t blame you for being concerned. I try to think of times like this as… natural, perhaps even necessary, moments of flux in between periods of greater certainty… disturbing while they last, but usually self-limiting.”

“So these incursions I’ve heard about… first Golden Moth, then those trucks out by Odessa…you think they’re just part of a pattern? Something cyclical?”

Gus inclines his head. “You could say that. As far as the cartel is concerned, it is mostly for show. An aggressive gesture without much real force behind it, as much for the benefit of their neighbours in Sinaloa as it is for our own. It’s a pattern I’ve noticed before.”

Abstraction helps. For years, Gus has kept her at a comfortable distance from the world where men move barrels of chemicals from warehouse to warehouse through tunnels at the border; she simply makes them disappear. Half of her job is editing and eliding things out of existence, and the rest is negotiating the passage of things that shouldn’t exist, things absent from inventories and bills of lading and taking up space in places she’s never seen until the chemists sublimate them away. When she collected her first payment, six hundred thousand dollars packed into a slim briefcase, she was shocked by the weight of it in her hands. When she read about Gale Boetticher, shot dead in his apartment, she saw her own blood patterning the sleek stone walls of her entryway and quickly willed that thought away, eyes shut tight. That was harder to abstract.

“It may seem counterintuitive,” Gus continues, “but sometimes, a controlled burn is the best way to pre-empt a wildfire.”

Lydia wouldn’t believe him if she didn’t know that he dislikes chaos as much as she does.

“Back when I took over the division,” she begins, “I went over everything I knew about the infrastructure of the North American sector. I drew all these schematics trying to visualise it. I had to lay them out on the floor just to keep track of how everything connected, and the closer I looked, the more weaknesses I found. Take the trans-Pacific freighters coming into Long Beach; they all have to be piloted into dock, individually, and if there’s a hold-up or a problem of some kind it can tie up millions of dollars worth of cargo, and that’s a risk we take every time a ship comes in. All it takes is one person’s inattention. Multiply that by the number of nodes in our network, and… well. I ran out of floor space before I could find everything. I submitted a review and made my recommendations, and our net income jumped twelve point four per cent in one quarter. It was covered in _The Wall Street Journal_. And still… every moment I spend at work, I’m just waiting for something to go wrong, somewhere, because it always will.”

She’s used to saying things like this and being brushed off by people who seem entirely too settled and too satisfied ( _don’t worry so much, Lydia_ , they say, heavy-handed as they pat her on the back), but Gus doesn’t offer platitudes. He just leans forward over his steepled hands, considering.

“You’re right to be concerned that something may go wrong,” Gus says. “I used to believe that there was such a thing as a perfect system, that with enough time and effort, I could have everything running flawlessly… I was seduced by that idea for too long. In a business this complex, there are just too many variables. We can only build a strong system and work to strengthen it.”

“A few weeks ago, I saw a psychiatrist,” says Lydia, placing those words as carefully as footsteps on a marble floor. “By choice. Someone I hadn’t seen before. I told her what I’ve just told you, and she asked me if I’d been… struggling, or… failing to cope, somehow. She asked me if I was afraid of what might happen if something did go wrong, something major, and it fell to me to deal with it. She seemed to think I would just… freeze up, or go to pieces.”

“Are _you_ afraid that could happen?”

“No.” Not that, exactly.

“Nor am I,” says Gus. “You thrive under pressure. I imagine you would be frustrated in a less challenging line of work. My concern, if I may be so forward, is that your fear can prompt you to act impulsively, perhaps against better judgement. Anxiety can cloud even the most capable minds. You understand the fight-or-flight response, Lydia; yours is sensitive, perhaps, difficult to keep in check… but your instincts are sound.”

“In other words, I just need to keep calm? Just— take a breath and think clearly?”

Gus spreads his hands in a graceful, diffident gesture. “I wasn’t going to be quite that direct, but…”

Lydia smiles, more easily than she’s used to.

She had come well-armoured to their first meeting, not that she’d known at the time that it would be anything more than another tiresome corporate social at a gallery she preferred to visit alone. There was nothing unusual about being introduced to a franchisee at these things, and nothing untoward about the conversation that followed. It was only after Gus led her into an anteroom to show her some of the canvases she’d missed that she realised he was her contact’s contact ( _all in strict confidence_ , she’d been told, _we’ll be in touch_ ) and this was her evaluation. He did seem honestly interested in the art. She admitted that she didn’t care for crowds, and pretended that was the whole reason she was nervous. He escorted her out to her cab in a way that struck her more as kind than simply polite. Two weeks later, her contact called and laid out the terms of her first assignment.

Gus understood her with startling clarity, and it took her some time to understand the truth in him. That truth encompasses how easily and sincerely he talks to Kiira, the unforced warmth in his smile, and the twenty-year-old photograph he keeps on top of the piano, angled so that only the player really sees it. It encompasses a singular dedication to order and efficiency, and a death toll. She isn’t sure if (who? how many?) Gus himself has killed— it unnerves her to picture a knife or a gun in his precise, gentle hands— but she is not under the illusion that he is harmless. Very few people are harmless. Lydia trusts him as much as she can trust anyone.

“I plan to visit Eladio perhaps five weeks from now,” Gus says. “After that, the disturbances should cease, and we will be much better placed to begin exporting.”

Lydia knows what Gus means by visiting Eladio, and it sends a faint jolt through her. She admires his strategy with a certain nervous thrill, and she is aware of the chance that it will kill him. She is, in private, afraid that it will kill him.

“And your chemist?” she asks, smoothing her skirt and tucking her hair back.

“It’s a delicate situation,” he concedes, “but nothing we can’t resolve.”

He’s as still and calm as ever, something Lydia has come to understand as immense strength. She gives herself away with as little as the row of crescent bruises on the soft underside of her hand, but Gus has barely any tells. It takes a great deal of strength to make such control look effortless, and to talk of Eladio as if his business with him is unrelated to the man in the photograph, a man she’s only ever seen in photographs faded by two decades of light.

“Still, if you’re concerned for your personal safety, perhaps Mike could advise you.”

“Yeah… with all due respect to him, we didn’t quite see eye to eye the last time. Not to say that he pressured me into anything, he was… very informative, but…”

Lydia notices the anxious play of her fingertips and draws her gaze back to Gus, away from the shade trees at the edge of the garden. “Keeping a _gun_ in the house, Gus, I… well, it’s not a decision I ever thought I’d have to make.”

“It’s not a decision anyone should make lightly. I don’t mean to sway you one way or the other, only that considering your options might give you some peace of mind.”

"Just so we're clear, you don't... you aren't imagining some scenario where I'm going to need one, right?"

"Absolutely not."

Gus touches her clasped hands, and she tries to concentrate on the abstract: she thinks of how both of them are thousands of miles from the places they were born, and how well they have made themselves untraceable. If this is the eye of the storm, she's found a quiet closeness there, and perhaps the closer she stays, the safer she'll be. They are the architects of something elegant and lethal, and a fuse lit twenty years ago is about to spark.

“All this is to say that I want you to feel safe, as far as possible.”

Lydia believes him as much as she can believe anyone.


	2. In the Blind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To everyone who read the first chapter, commented, bookmarked, left kudos or liked/reblogged on Tumblr: thank you! All feedback, including concrit, is most welcome.
> 
> Many thanks to M. for her feedback on this chapter, which went through several iterations. This is another Lydia-centric one, but the story as a whole should be more or less evenly split between Mike's and Lydia's perspectives.

Eighteen hours after leaving Frankfurt, she’s home, and Kiira is buzzing around her in delight. It’s well past her usual bedtime, but Lydia’s not above making the occasional exception after long business trips.

“You are going to be _so_ tired in the morning,” Lydia says, lifting her up for another hug. “It’s a quarter to ten!”

“Will you read to me before I go to sleep?”

“You want me to read to you, huh?” From the looks of her, Kiira won’t stay awake through more than a couple of pages. Lydia herself passed _exhausted_ several time zones ago and is now in the shaky, energetic phase of jet lag; it’s already early morning in central Europe. “Well, how about you go on and get into bed, and I’ll come and see you as soon as I’ve talked to Delores, okay? Did you brush your teeth already?”

“Yup.”

“Okay, then. Say goodnight to Delores.”

“Buenas noches,” Kiira says, clambering down out of Lydia’s arms. Delores nods, and kisses her on the top of her head. 

“Buenas noches, mija. Sleep well.”

“How was she?” Lydia asks, slipping off her coat, as Kiira disappears down the hall.

“Good, very good,” says Delores. “She didn’t say a word about her bedtime all week.”

“Did she wake you at all?”

“Only the first two nights. I think she saw something on TV that made her upset.”

“We’ve been over this, Delores,” says Lydia, folding the coat and smoothing out a crease. “There are channels I don’t want her watching. I don't care how many times she asks…”

“Oh, no, it wasn’t any of those. We were just watching the DVDs you left. _Planet Earth_.”

“Huh. What was it that scared her?”

Delores shrugs. “She wouldn’t say. It was the episode with the polar bears.”

Lydia’s trying to remember if she’s seen that one when the phone on the counter rings. She excuses herself to take the call in the lobby, slipping off her shoes and setting them down next to Kiira’s.

"Lydia Rodarte-Quayle?" a woman asks, hesitating a little over the unfamiliar name. "This is Cynthia Ruiz from Los Pollos Hermanos in Albuquerque."

She sounds bright and strained, unsure of herself, and in that instant Lydia knows. Her heart starts beating so hard and fast she can hear it. There’s only one reason why anyone from the restaurant would think to call her on this number; it was in their contingency plans.

"I'm so sorry to have to tell you this, but… Gus had you listed as his emergency contact, and..."

“Yes.” _Please stop talking_ , Lydia thinks. _Please don’t say it. I know_.

"He died about an hour ago."

Cynthia talks on in the distance, polite and frantic and out of her depth, telling Lydia that she’s only just found out from the police, that there was some sort of bombing, three people killed at a nursing home and nobody knows why. Lydia presses the heel of her hand over the bright jagged pain in her chest and tries to remember what Gus taught her about calm, controlled breathing, but all that comes back is a memory of white flowers and cicadas and the sensation of his hands on hers the last time they met, before she knew it would be the last time she ever saw him, and that in itself seems cruel. If she’d known, maybe she would have—

“Ms. Rodarte-Quayle? Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Lydia says, reflexively. “Thank you, Cynthia.”

“If you want, I can give you the number the officers gave me?”

“Please.”

Lydia barely feels herself write the number down, hang up and walk back out of the entryway. The ringing in her ears has become a keen electronic whine. She has only a hazy sense of what she should be doing, and she tells herself to snap out of it. They planned for this eventuality; it shouldn’t shock her as much as it has. It isn’t until Delores is right beside her, grasping her arm and looking at her with concern, that she realises she’s in a cold sweat and her knees are about to buckle.

“What’s wrong? You’re white as a sheet… come on, let’s sit down…”

Lydia obediently sits down, because the room is going grey around the edges. She could claim that she’s simply feeling ill — she would hardly have to pretend — but something in the way Delores looks at her makes her feel very young, stripped and split open, unable to tell anything but the truth. A part of the truth, at least.

“Gus Fring is dead,” she says. To hear it said out loud feels like being struck, but it cuts through some of the haze and brings her back to herself. “There was… some kind of explosion in a building in Albuquerque, and he was killed.”

“Oh, Lydia…”

It occurs to her that Delores must have seen another part of the truth when she met Gus, and when Lydia meets her eyes, the open sympathy there — the _kindness_ — is almost too much. She’s shuddering and her eyes are brimming and she feels wretched and weak and five years old. She’s never had to make arrangements for anyone — she was only Kiira’s age when her father died, and strangers took care of everything — and now there is so much work to be done, so many contingencies to confront, and none of it can be entrusted to strangers.

As Delores holds her shoulders, Lydia folds forward, dropping her head into her hands. She doesn’t allow herself to think about Gus, though his presence is so vivid he might as well be sitting next to her. She doesn’t allow herself to think about her father. She takes two deep breaths, tries to settle her expression, and straightens up.

“Delores, could you stay with Kiira, please? I just need a few minutes. I have to make some calls.”

“Do you want me to stay another night?” Delores asks. The question, so sudden and straightforward, catches Lydia off guard.

“That’s very kind of you, but I don’t want to impose…”

“No, no, no. Don’t worry. I’ll stay. I’ll be here if you need me or if Kiira wakes.”

“Thank you.” Lydia runs a hand over her face and tries not to rub at her eyes. “I won’t be too long. Thank you, Delores.”

 

In the quiet of her study, Lydia retrieves her burner and dials in a predetermined order: first Mike, then Tyrus, then Chris. When she tries Mike, the dialling tones stretch out endlessly. Either he’s still out of range in Mexico, or if Gus sent for him after all, he may well have been the third one killed in the blast. Dennis from the laundry is the first person she manages to reach, and when she tells him to shut down supply and stop the trucks from going out, he just gives a short, bitter laugh.

“Supply? The lab’s gone up in flames. I’ve got three fire crews on site. Supply’s over.”

“Listen,” Lydia says, “I can’t get hold of anyone else, so you’ll have to pass this on. The trucks can’t go out. They’ve got inventory on hand, right? It needs to be destroyed. All of it. Do you understand?”

“Look, ma’am, I just manage the place. I don’t pack the stuff, I don’t send the trucks out… you want one of the guys over at the farm for that.”

“Yeah, well. They’re not picking up, so I’m asking you, because you’re closer. Please get the message through.”

She tries Mike again and gets nothing.

“You should have six barrels of precursor due to go out this week,” she tells Duane Chow, who sounds as bewildered as she feels. “Don’t move them. I have the serial numbers. I’m going to re-enter them into the database and create a new batch of receipts.”

“You want to… put them back on the books?”

“They have to be on the books if they’re in your warehouse. They have to be on _my_ books if they’re in your warehouse. When the DEA start looking around — and they will — everything on your shelves needs to be accounted for, legitimately.”

“Six barrels… that’s over one point three million dollars,” Chow observes. “Lot to account for.”

“One point three at black market rates, which, by the way, are going to _increase_ as soon as they decide to crack down on methylamine, so I really hope your security is more robust than it used to be…” Lydia sighs, realising what he’s hinting at. “You’ll get your cut. Just let me figure it out.”

“I trust you,” says Chow. “But I’m in a tight spot here. You understand.”

Mike still won’t pick up.

After getting through to Novak and telling him in German that her partner has been killed and she won’t be able to supply them after all, Lydia snaps the phone shut and reminds herself that the small suitcase at the back of her closet is always packed, and that she has enough cash on hand to get herself and Kiira out of the country at a few hours’ notice, if it comes to that. She doesn’t cry, although her eyes are burning and the bones of her face ache with the pressure of tears; she just leans her head against the locked door and rehearses what she will have to say next.

 

“Come and find me if you need me,” says Delores, resting a hand on Lydia’s shoulder before gently closing the door to Kiira’s room. She’s still awake; they’ve been taking turns reading in the pale glow of the bedside lamp. Lydia nods in thanks and steels herself as the door clicks shut behind her. It won’t be like when they told her about her father, she thinks. It won’t.

“Well, look at you,” Lydia says, giving Kiira a weak smile. “Delores told me you were very good when I was away.”

“Mommy, are you still going to read to me?” Kiira asks, small-voiced and hesitant now, trying not to yawn. She knows it’s late.

Lydia sits down at the foot of the bed, lets Kiira climb into her lap, and draws her close. Kiira’s head is tucked under her chin, and Lydia shuts her eyes and tries to embrace her completely, as if holding her like this could possibly keep her safe. She’s only five. She loved Gus. There’s so much she can’t know.

“Kiira, honey… there’s something I have to tell you.”


	3. Tucumcari

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who has read so far! As always, all feedback is most welcome. <3
> 
> This chapter started as a fairly narrow outline and grew into something I didn't quite anticipate; it felt like a bit of a departure from how I usually write, but I hope it works. 
> 
> The Mike & Lydia playlist I put together back when I was planning this story can be found [here](http://8tracks.com/sylvestris/she-s-a-smart-kid-smart-as-a-whip).

“You got anything put aside for a rainy day?” Mike asks, without preamble, when Jesse steps outside for a smoke. “Anything you might wanna tell me about?”

Jesse rubs the back of his neck and his eyes go up to the corner where the porch ceiling meets the stuccoed wall, up where the mosquitoes are gathering. The question makes him shifty; he looks all of a sudden like a twelve-year-old who broke a window playing catch. Mike can see the heat rising in his cheeks.

“Look, it’s just…” Jesse begins, eye contact faltering. He scuffs his shoes together and sighs hard, fidgeting like he can’t quite keep still under Mike’s gaze. “I don’t know, I just…”

“We knew you were skimming from the lab,” Mike says evenly. That gets Jesse’s attention and brings out that hard glint in his eyes, although it seems to Mike that he’s wearing another man’s toughness and it fits him as poorly as his clothes do.

“Yeah,” Jesse says finally. He barks it out with much more force than he can back up, and when he faces Mike he looks very small. “It figures. That you knew. I mean, you musta had a pretty good reason to keep me around so long… if you and Gus wanted to waste me over this, you’d have done it way back. Unless this is, like, tying up loose ends or whatever. You know? Like, put me into a false sense of security, then take me outside and put a bullet into—”

“Just shut the hell up and tell me how much you’ve got in the house.”

Jesse looks away, exhaling smoke, fidgeting with a fresh-looking pack of cigarettes. Light from a streetlamp flashes off the torn cellophane.

“An ounce,” he admits. “Maybe two.”

“Uh-huh. Anything else? See, I’m assuming business was slow, ‘cause if you and your friends were moving any quantity worth talking about, we’d have noticed. Our guys on the street would have noticed. And they’d have dealt with it. So, I’m going to make this very clear: it’s your _personal_ stash that I’m concerned about.”

“For what? I get it, Gus didn’t like to work with junkies. What’s it matter to anyone now?”

Mike watches him, waiting for him to stop fronting.

“I’m not using, okay? I haven’t… it’s been, like, forty-six days. I haven’t touched it.”

Jesse’s talking as if he’s under the impression Mike might not have noticed if he was high. It speaks of experience hiding from parents who didn’t know what to look for, and learned the tells only as quickly as Jesse must have learned to hide them.

“You haven’t been to your group in a while. Not working out for you?”

“Yeah. No. I just… I don’t know. Talking about it and everything, it just felt like… it’s like they tell you, you don’t ever stop being an addict, right? You can go through all the steps and stay clean and turn your life around and all that, but… at the end of the day, _recovering_ addict is the best you’ll ever be.”

“I can think of plenty of worse things you could be than a recovering addict,” Mike says. Jesse’s already looking away, half-shaking his head.

“Everything that happened… it’s done, you know? No taking it back. Self-acceptance. That’s what they keep talking about. As if sitting in a circle and telling a bunch of strangers about the worst thing you ever did doesn’t just make it all worse.” Jesse tilts his head back and grinds out the stub of his second cigarette, toeing the cement between two bricks, looking chastened. “Look, Mike, I’m sorry, okay? But I promise I’m clean. My… my girlfriend, she, uh… she’s clean, too. We’ve been supporting each other.”

“And you’re not worried that between the two of you someone could backslide? You told me her kid’s in the hospital. She must be under a lot of stress.”

Mike doesn’t feel the need to labour the point. He remembers the dead girl, lying in that miserable little room with cardboard taped over the hole in the door and her works laid out on the nightstand like a glass of water. The thing that gets to him is Jesse’s come a long way since then and he still looks lost.

“Andrea’s not gonna backslide, and neither am I. We’ve got Brock to think about, right? We both agreed we can’t afford to get high.” Jesse’s grasping for some kind of truth there, or trying to create it. “I’ll give you back what I took, all right, but there’s nothing else. Search my house if you want.”

Mike eyes him a moment longer, but shakes his head. Not tonight. 

“So… do you, uh… do you need a ride home?”

* * *

As Jesse pulls away from the curb, Mike collects a week’s worth of bills and circulars from the mailbox and notes the grass cuttings scattered across his garden path, blown over from one of the neighbours’ lawns. He doesn’t see the sense in mowing lawns when it’s this dry, people keeping their sprinklers hissing all day just to coax it up enough to make it worth mowing, but maybe they had a spell of good weather while he was gone. 

Inside, he pours himself a drink and switches on the television to clear the back-and-forth of Walter’s and Jesse’s voices out of his head. It’s far too late an hour to be having the conversation he’s about to start, but there’s nothing to be gained from delaying the inevitable. He keys in the most recent number he has for Lydia, hoping she hasn’t replaced her burner in the past week. He’ll text her work cellphone if it comes to that, and he knows how badly that would spook her at the best of times.

“Yeah?”

"It's me,” Mike says. “I’d have called you sooner, but I’ve been tied up.”

The line goes quiet, as if Lydia’s covering the receiver, and he hears a faint “Oh, my _God_ …”.

"Take a breath, Lydia," Mike says, keeping his tone calm and even. “Whereabouts are you?”

He takes a drink, giving her a moment to collect herself, half-listening to the voices on TV talk about something distant and mundane.

“I-I’m at home. Is it safe to talk?”

“Is it safe to t— Would I be calling you if it wasn’t?” Mike sighs. “When did you find out?”

“Twenty-four hours ago. I was flying back from Atlanta when it happened, so I didn’t know anything until I got home and someone from the restaurant called me…”

Lydia takes a long, shuddering breath, and forces her voice back out of its quivering upper register. “I called you over and over. No one could tell me where you were. I thought maybe you’d come back early and you were the third one killed.”

“Tyrus Kitt was the third. Have they outed anyone on the news yet?”

“No. None of us, at least. They’ve been talking about the Salamancas, but it’s all just speculation, and… God, I barely know what’s going on. Gus told me— the last time I saw him, he told me this was all just a moment of flux. Just the cartel throwing its weight around. He told me that once he’d gone to Mexico, things would settle down, and… I knew he was worried, Mike, but I’ve seen him worried like that before, and…”

It makes sense that Lydia must think this was the work of the cartel. For now, at least, he’ll let her. Better that than telling her Gus Fring hired a maniac who couldn’t keep his DEA brother-in-law out of their affairs.

“I already talked to Chow, I told him not to move anything in the warehouse and I’d deal with the receipts, and I’ve taken care of everything else I can from here, but I’m going to need your help for the rest.”

“What remains isn’t really business we can transact over the phone,” Mike says. “Can you get over here for Thursday morning? As much as I’d like to get this over with, I can’t see you tomorrow, unless you feel like sitting in a hotel room all day.”

“Thursday. Right.” Lydia pauses, steeling herself. “What’s going to happen to him?”

Something about that catches Mike off guard a little.

“APD’ll hand over to the medical investigators. They’ll do an autopsy, file a report… it’ll most likely take them a week or two to release the body.”

“He had a will, didn’t he? Who was the executor?”

Mike’s used to Lydia’s mental leaps, but this particular line of inquiry makes him wonder if she’s thinking straight.

“Mike, I’m just saying I should at least know these things, shouldn’t I? If I have to tell people I’m coming here to— I mean, he had no family, no next of kin, and it’s going to fall to someone to make arrangements…”

Again, Mike thinks, it’s far too late to be having this conversation.

“We’ll talk about it on Thursday,” Mike says. “Go on and book your flight.”

* * *

Mike’s coffee, burnt and overfilled by the gas station’s self-service machine, sends up wisps of steam as he watches the rear-view mirror. He can see Lydia hesitate for just a second as her cab pulls away, her head turned like she’s scanning the motel’s empty lot, before she hurries to the car. He doesn’t blame her; this is not a place he’d send her on her own.

“So, what’s here?” she asks, light and brittle, folding her sunglasses and tucking them into her purse. She looks like she might shatter if Mike so much as raises his voice.

“Nothing important. Good place to meet, that’s all.”

Lydia seems relieved at that.

“Petersen wanted to meet you on home turf, so to speak, and given the circumstances I didn’t have a lot of room to negotiate, so we got a good distance to cover. I figured you’d feel better if I picked you up somewhere out of the way.” Mike reaches into the glovebox and hands her a new burner and a list of names and numbers. “Those are all in use as of last night. We’ll ditch your old phone when we stop.”

“They were very sympathetic at work,” Lydia mutters, her fingertips fluttering over the keypad, as Mike pulls out of the lot. She sounds as if she hasn’t slept in days. “They told me to take as much time as I needed. God knows what’ll happen when the truth gets out and I have to play ignorant...”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Mike says. “You lived nine hundred miles apart. I’d say that gives you a pretty good basis for not knowing what he was _allegedly_ up to behind the scenes.”

Lydia frowns, concentrating on the numbers.

“Petersen’s out at Tucumcari, right?” she asks, after a few minutes of silence.

Mike nods. “We’ve got a couple of detours to make first. There are a few drop spots out this way. I want to make sure there’s nothing left lying around.”

“Do you have a map?”

“I know this route. There’s a road atlas in the glovebox if you want it.”

Lydia finds Tucumcari and goes quiet over the pages, tracing highways and railroads with her index finger. She’s absorbed in the atlas until they reach their first stop, a small grove off one of the exits near Sedillo, where she gets out as if wanting some fresh air and follows him as he retrieves the shovel from the trunk.

“Do you want any help?”

Mike raises his eyebrows a fraction. “I’m good, thanks.”

Lydia quickly draws breath and says, “Gus told me you were shot, in Mexico.”

“Yeah.”

She hesitates, eyeing the shovel. “Let me do it.”

Lydia has an interesting way of expressing concern.

“You’ve brought me all the way out here,” she says, taking off her neat black jacket and laying it on the seat. “I might as well make myself useful, and if you’re injured…”

“I appreciate the thought,” says Mike, “but I can manage, and I didn’t bring you out here to help me dig holes.”

“Show me where.”

She’s serious, drawn up to her full height, her eyes narrowed against the sun, so Mike outlines the location of the cache with the blade of the shovel and lets her get to it. 

The tool is awkward in her hands at first; she shifts her grip a few times and stabs at the dirt, and has to lean her full weight on the handle before the dry earth will give; but she gets the hang of it quickly enough, and doesn’t fling up too much dust. Mike’s watched her for a minute or so when his phone vibrates in his pocket.

“Hey,” Jesse says. “It’s, uh— it’s me.”

“Yeah?”

“We talked to Joe, and he says he and his guys can get everything set up by tomorrow like we wanted, so…”

Mike pretends not to hear Walter in the background, telling Jesse to put him on, it sounds like.

“Okay.”

“I was just thinking,” he continues, in that careful tone of voice that means it’s his partner’s opinion getting aired here rather than his own, “we could maybe use some help, with, uh, the detailed planning and all…”

Mike takes a calm breath and bites back all the things he’d like to say to Walter White right now.

“Tell him I’m out of town today, dealing with something else. I’ll call you back tonight.” _Click_.

Lydia smooths out the earth with the flat of the shovel and comes back clutching a duct-taped parcel of cash the size of a brick.

* * *

There are fresh tire tracks leading onto Petersen’s property, a disused farm on the outskirts of Tucumcari, but no cars in sight. Mike cuts the engine and sits, considering things.

“Is something wrong?”

“I’m going to take a look inside. Unfasten your seatbelt, get the door open.”

Lydia frowns, not following.

“If anything happens, you want to be able to get away from the car.”

“I think we should leave,” Lydia says softly, eyes darting around. “Mike, I— this doesn’t seem safe.”

The mere suggestion that something might happen has put her on edge, but this doesn’t feel quite right to him either.

“Trust me,” says Mike, “if I was that worried, we’d be gone already. Wait here.”

Mike draws his gun and listens for anything out of place against the faint scouring sound of the wind, Lydia’s nervous breathing, the hissing of insects and grass. There are no voices, and no footsteps other than his own, muted by the soft, sandy earth.

When he enters the barn he finds Petersen soon enough, shot three or four times in the chest. There are no signs that the body was moved, nor of any great disturbance. By the looks of him, he was killed on the spot, and it’s only been an hour or two.

Mike steps back out of the line of light and edges back toward the door, switching the safety off. There’s no use in sweeping the rest of the building: if someone’s come here for him and Lydia, he’d be playing right into their hands by moving further away from her. She’s standing on the driver’s side of the car, and if he steps out from behind the doorframe he’ll get her attention, but not without losing his cover.

A bullet punctures the quiet air, glancing off the roof of the car on the passenger side, and Lydia drops so quickly Mike thinks for a moment she was hit, but she’s down below the open door, flattening herself against the ground. So much for cover.

“Get in the car,” Mike calls, stepping out and scanning the brush for the shooter. “In the back. _Lydia_. Get in—”

Two more shots blow through the metal wall a few feet above his head. Lydia’s scrambling to her feet, ducking inside the car and disappearing below the dashboard.

“Lydia, get down in the back, _right now_ —”

Mike sees the guy then, maybe twenty yards back, and he’s lining up his sights when Lydia starts the engine and the car jerks forward with enough force that the momentum slams one of the doors shut. She means for him to get in; she’s turning the car to give him a clear run at the passenger seat, or she’s trying to block the shots or something equally insane, and she looks wide-eyed and frantic.

“Mike! Come _on_!”

Better inside the car than out, he thinks, until Lydia floors it and spins the car through one hundred and eighty degrees in a panicked attempt to gain traction, and Mike gets another glimpse of the shooter before dust rushes up in a half-circle around them and clouds the windshield. He’s not sure Lydia knows the direction of the gate but she guns for it anyway, accelerating hard enough to shove him back against his seat. The dust blows back and Mike can feel both right tires dip into the gulley that runs alongside the road, and for a moment Lydia has to cling to the wheel to keep herself from falling across the central console, but she quickly rights the car and brings the hood level with the horizon.

Mike fastens his seatbelt before turning around. The shooter’s no longer visible, but he can see them well enough; his next bullet shatters the back windshield and exits through the window adjacent. Lydia gasps, flinching and ducking her head.

“ _Shit_ ,” Mike growls. They’re nearing the outbuildings they passed on the way in, and as they rush by he sees an SUV idling up on the access road. “Take a hard left. Up ahead.”

“Mike, what’s happening? Who is this?”

“Petersen’s guys, it looks like. I found him dead in the barn. Keep your eyes forward.”

Lydia shakes her head, uncomprehending. “Why would— you mean someone set us up?”

“Someone knew we were coming, and—” Mike grabs the door handle as Lydia swerves through a rough turn. “Petersen trusted someone he shouldn’t have, that’s probably the gist of it.”

Whoever’s in the passenger seat of the SUV is leaning out of the window with something more substantial than a small-calibre pistol. Lydia could give them the slip if she makes it back onto the highway, but these empty farm roads don’t afford any cover. Somewhere on the plain a freight train sounds its horn, probably rounding the hill a few miles south. If they keep on bearing left, away from the flat fields bordering the railroad and down toward the riverbed, they’ll be a little harder to hit.

“They’re getting closer,” Lydia says shakily. Her eyes keep darting from the rear-view mirror to the road and from the road to the hills, trying to make out an escape route in the vast openness. The ground is rutted with tire tracks and potholes, and they’re pushing seventy miles an hour. If she loses control of the car here, she’ll go through the windshield.

“They’re close enough already. Keep going straight.”

It seems at first that Lydia’s only trying to keep them out of the ditch when she veers right, wrenches the wheel around and sends them down a sharp incline slippery with gravel, a spur of the track he hadn’t noticed. Something snaps in the car’s suspension, and Lydia yelps and braces herself against the seat. She’s almost standing on the pedals to keep herself from sliding into the footwell, and the speedometer needle jumps up toward eighty.

“Keep it together, Lydia, or you’re gonna get us both killed.”

“I got it… hang on…”

They’re racing along a vague suggestion of a track, a faint path worn through the dry grass and sagebrush by ATVs looking for a shortcut, and while Lydia looks white and petrified, there’s a purposeful set to her expression that tells him this change of course was intentional.

“You wanna tell me what your plan is here?”

Lydia’s swerving between the remnants of a low wire fence and skidding onto the asphalt of a marked road when their pursuers fire off another shot, barely missing the car’s undercarriage, and she careens off to the left. She has the sense not to drive in a straight line, at least, but after every weaving turn she glances back and forth to reorient herself as if she’s seeking a very specific angle of attack, concentrating on something up ahead. That slight swell in the land where it presses up against the sky. The railroad crossing, marked with a post and a warning but no barriers.

“Lydia…”

“I see it…” Lydia mutters, glancing at the growing speck of the oncoming train, judging her distance and increasing her speed. Mike restrains himself from grabbing the wheel. “Come on, come on, come on, come on…”

They’re doing eighty-five when the road crests at the crossing, and the car barely seems to touch the rails, the front wheels at least are off the track, and suddenly the train is a solid rushing wall behind them and the tone of the warning horn is curving away into the air. Some kind of miracle ensures that the resounding impact with the ground doesn’t completely destroy the suspension or throw Lydia out of her seat, though she cries out and struggles to regain her grip on the controls.

A couple of miles further, when they’ve reached a stub of an access road within sight of the highway, Lydia pulls over next to an embankment. The guttering sound of the engine dies out. Mike touches his side to check that he hasn’t ripped any stitches, then turns in his seat to face her.

“What in God’s name were you thinking?”

“Two minutes,” says Lydia, still staring ahead with her hands locked in place on the wheel. She’s out of breath, and her words come haltingly; her voice has taken on that panicky slurred quality he’s heard a few times before. “It— that line is used for high-volume freight, it takes two minutes, give or take, for— for one of those trains to clear a crossing. Given average s-speed and loading…”

She trails off, shaking her head, running a hand over her face.

“So you figured you’d cross in front of a speeding train to give us a two-minute lead.”

“Mike, they were _shooting_ at us. I didn’t— know what to do. I was scared.”

Mike stares at her for a long moment. It’s in her nature to consider the variables and make the calculations, but she wouldn’t have gone charging down that slope and across the tracks if not out of overwhelming fear. Perhaps it was his mistake, leaving the key in the ignition back at Petersen’s place. People don’t tend to think clearly when they’re being shot at for the first time.

“We shook them, right?” Lydia continues, looking to him for confirmation. Her eyes are glazed; she should be calming down, but instead she’s getting clouded over with panic. “Even if they crossed after the train, they’re— they’re not going to t-track us all the way down here, are they?”

Mike shakes his head. “They won’t find us. Wouldn’t be worth their while to look.”

He checks the car for damage on his way round to the driver’s side. There are more than a few scratches and scrapes, but the shot through the windshield appears to be the only one that connected, and the tires are still sound. Lydia stumbles out of the car shaking like a leaf, and makes it a few steps before she has to fling a hand out for balance. She seems more shaken up than hurt, but she’s taking deep, uneven breaths and her eyes are fluttering shut, and when Mike reaches her he grasps her arms before she can drop.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Easy. Slow your breathing down.”

This is the most frightened he’s ever seen her— she’s clutching at his sleeves, disoriented, breathing in with a strangled sound— and he tries not to look too hard. People who put walls up around themselves don’t do it just for the hell of it, and he respects Lydia too much to see through her.

"Now, listen," Mike tells her when she finally meets his eyes. "You’re still in one piece. So am I. You got us out of there, and we’re good. You understand?”

Lydia nods, blinking hard, trying to steady herself. She’s pale, greyish, under the fine film of dust.

“We’re good,” Mike repeats, putting an arm around her. “Come on.”

* * *

“You told me Petersen was looking for protection.”

“After a fashion. He was worrying about how to keep his guys happy now that the cash flow’s stopped, that was part of it.”

Mike had planned on stopping for gas and eating at one of the diners along the road before heading back into Albuquerque, but they can’t very well leave the car unattended with the back windshield missing and a few hundred thousand dollars of drug money in the spare tire well, so they’re making do with coffee and sandwiches in the rest stop’s parking lot. When Lydia claimed not to be hungry, he convinced her to at least drink a soda or something, and she looks marginally less like she’s about to keel over.

“They didn’t want money,” says Lydia, rubbing at a patch of dust on her sleeve. “Those men, surely they would have held us at gunpoint if they just wanted money, and— those didn’t seem like warning shots.”

She’s not wrong.

“Petersen was loyal to Gus, right? He wanted to negotiate with me, and he stood to benefit from it, and… not that I was going to make any promises I wouldn’t have been able to keep, but I have more information than he and his employees would have known what to do with. It makes no sense, from a—a business perspective, to shoot at someone you want to negotiate with.”

Lydia, he understands, desperately needs this whole crisis to make sense from a business perspective.

“Like I said, he trusted someone he shouldn’t have,” says Mike. “My guess is those guys saw their chance to get the drop on him and take us out of the picture at the same time. No great mystery to it. They were probably opportunists looking to grab some territory, and they’re welcome to it; I don’t think they’ll go to the trouble of bothering us again.”

Lydia taps her fingers against her soda can, thinking.

“Should I be worried about this?”

“No.”

“Because it’s not a problem, or because there’s nothing I can do about it?”

“Both,” says Mike, “and because you’ve got enough on your plate as it is.”

“If anything changes, you’ll—”

“I’ll let you know about it. What I want you to do tonight is put it out of your mind. Go back to your hotel, get some sleep… I’ll call you tomorrow.”

She’s holding his gaze as if trying to convince herself she can trust him. Her insistence on helping him with the dead drops makes a kind of sense now: things are falling apart around her, and she’ll do anything to feel like she’s clawing back a little control.

“You can do this,” Mike says.

Lydia watches him a little longer, then gives him the smallest, slightest nod of thanks.


	4. Hollow Play

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story had to go on the back burner for a few weeks, but I'm hoping to establish a regular update schedule soon. Thanks to everyone who has been following along so far! As always, feedback is very welcome.
> 
> Content note: I've touched on Lydia's anxiety/panic symptoms in previous chapters, but they're described in a bit more detail here.

A band is playing “La Vie En Rose” in a vast, cramped conference centre ballroom done up for the evening, and Lydia’s wearing a floor-length gown and a stiff smile. She appreciates formality, but the dancing at these occasions strikes her as both old-fashioned and adolescent at once, and she’s not interested in making a fool of herself. She’s relieved, though, when Gus asks her. He knows what he’s doing, and he will pull her out of the room if it gets unbearable.

A few bars into the second verse, he draws her slightly closer and leans in as if to ask her a question. The gesture is intimate, but not forward. It’s nothing that would attract any attention, especially not in this crowd.

“Phenylacetic acid,” he whispers. Lydia shivers. “Six hundred gallons.”

He says it as quietly as he breathes. Lydia meets his eyes and finds his expression perfectly still. There are perhaps three hundred people in the room, hemming them in. She can’t move without being touched and is grateful for Gus keeping hold of her; it’s talismanic, but her breathing still quickens when she thinks about how surrounded she is. Fight or flight. Something’s telling her to run.

Lydia doesn’t run. She has years of practice in standing her ground. She leans in, close enough for her chin to touch his collar, and whispers, “Where?”

“Brownsville.”

He means it’s going to cross the border, from Brownsville to Matamoros. She knows about the recent ephedrine seizures at the port of Manzanillo; the cartels must be in need of precursor. She knows, also, that the Juarez Cartel does not control Matamoros. Either Gus is dealing with their rivals or they’re looking to expand. This is not a test of her capabilities; he wouldn’t take such a risk, not when the cost of failure would be so high. It could be a test of her nerve. This close, he can probably feel her pulse racing.

“Can you do it?”

Lydia glances away from him and thinks. She needs to visualise two viable routes of supply, one real, one smokescreen. The staging area should be at Harlingen. There’s a depot near Midland that handles plenty of chemical traffic and the barrels will come from there; it’ll be a few hours’ work to find what she needs in the database and draw up the necessary accounts. Six hundred gallons is twenty standard drums which means several vehicles and a bribe, probably, if they’re crossing the border at one of the checkpoints whose officers can be persuaded not to look too closely. They’ll be marked and numbered and traceable to Golden Moth, of course, so the false trail has to start with her contact in Guangzhou. The barrels, should they ever fall into the hands of the DEA or the Federales, will trace back to a fictitious stolen shipment routed through one of the Mexican Pacific ports. It’s late morning in south-eastern China; she can get right onto it.

“Give me forty-eight hours.”

Five days after his death, torn from sleep and retching in her hotel bathroom in the middle of the night, Lydia traces those points over and over in her head and is more certain of them than of wherever she is now. She has barely slept all week, and her thoughts are slanting off at odd angles. In this locked suite with its pale gold light it could be any city, any time of day, and her misdeeds are mapped out all over the world. She could believe Tucumcari was only a fever dream if she hadn’t come back with scratches and bruises and heat-sickness; when she stands to fill a glass with water, shivering in her thin robe, the room recedes and black spots start shimmering before her eyes. She lies back down on the cool ceramic floor and stares up at the blank ceiling until it blurs, half-seeing all the routes she and Gus plotted out, half-seeing Gulf cities and dirt roads and an ocean that goes on for days.

  


* * *

  


Did you know him well? _I was his friend_ , she tells them. Narrow windowless corridors, institutional carpeting, bland paintings of arid landscapes. Lawyers and police officers and medical investigators and their respective representatives. Some of them tell her in smooth tones that they are sorry for her loss. They use the same smooth tones to tell her that the will and associated documents have been seized by the police department. Lydia is not good at feigning surprise, but they take her for overwhelmed. Anyone would be.

 _I was his friend_. She waits in a series of artificially cool rooms, in oppressive silence. She sits in some reception area tracing the ridges on a plastic cup of water. She stands at a counter and signs all the forms as indicated, feeling the floor tilt slightly under her feet.

In private, she calls a number for a lawyer in Monterrey whom she was instructed to call Don Roberto. There was a will drawn up in 1988, he says, but any instructions will be rendered invalid if the assets are seized, provided they weren’t already nullified by the creation of a more recent will. To the best of his knowledge, Gus has no surviving next of kin, neither in Mexico nor Chile. The business, such as it was at the time, a house in the district of San Pedro Garza Garcia, and a modest personal fortune were all dedicated to one Señor Maximino Arciniega Rojas, originally of Santiago, most recently of the aforementioned address in Monterrey. There Don Roberto pauses in his reading and reminds her that Max Arciniega died the following year. He and Gus would have been younger than she is now.

 

Duane Chow, when she meets him, has a starburst-shaped scar on the back of his right hand. Lydia imagines the fine metacarpals shattering and feels a little sick. It seems excessive to shoot someone that way just to teach them a lesson. Through the dominant hand, at that.

“I didn’t expect him to send you,” he says, nervously lighting his cigarette. The smoke hits the back of her throat and makes her eyes water behind her sunglasses. “No offense.”

“Yes.” Lydia glances through the bar’s coloured curtains to the shadowed view of the street, and passes him the bag under the table. “Well. Here I am.”

“You haven’t done this before?” he asks, rhetorically.

Not looking at him, Lydia reaches for his carbon-paper notepad and writes:

> _$278,754.00 inc. interest (5%)  
>  of which $35,000 due to J. Peng  
>  No more payments outstanding_

  


“Peng’s out of town,” Chow says, reading the note a second time and nodding before putting the notepad away.

“Out of town.” Is that an euphemism?

“Gone to stay with her sister in San Diego. We heard about the guy who got arrested. She was worried something could happen.”

“What do you mean? Who was arrested?”

“Someone over in Lubbock. I don’t know his name. I heard—” Chow leans closer, “he got caught with the product.”

“Does Mike know?”

Chow shrugs. “Mike never tells me a whole lot about how he works. I figure he’s laying low, probably got eyes on the DEA… this sounded more like local police.”

Mike calls her, late at night, and talks cryptically about a piece of evidence that’s been dealt with. “What do you know about this?” she asks.

“It wasn’t any of my guys. Settle down, will you? If it pertained to you in any way, I woulda told you about it. How’d it go with the lawyer?”

“He was… trying to be helpful,” Lydia says. “There’s still no word on any family.”

“You know you can leave these matters to the county,” Mike says.

She doesn’t think she can.

  


* * *

  


There are people outside her door in the grey early hours, shouting, footsteps tumbling. Lydia’s out of bed before she can stand. Her instinct is to hide, of course, but one glance around the room and she understands why trapped animals freeze in place: if this is the police, they’ll break down the door if they have to.

They’re only guests coming back after a late night. They’re closing doors to adjacent rooms and their voices are quieting.

She drifts for an hour or so, unaware of time passing but never really at rest. She’s staring at the ceiling when Peter Schuler calls, and in a haze of dream logic she wonders if it would be in his interests to have her arrested. Schuler was only a facilitator, after all, paid handsomely for bankrolling in the early days and turning a blind eye when the operation grew. He could deflect this onto her and avoid penalty; only the company itself would hold him liable for the damages in his division. Church and state. Madrigal’s stockholders will deal with him, and the federal government will deal with her.

“We’re preparing a press release.”

On the other hand, if she ever faced charges, Schuler’s identity would be her strongest foundation for a plea bargain. Immunity, even.

“Do you need my input?”

“I’m keeping it out of your division,” Schuler says. “You were his friend; your task now is to sell that story.”

“I— I don’t have a lot to work with here,” says Lydia, rubbing her temple. “If there’s anything else you can give me…”

“They will expect you to be confused,” he says, after a moment of reflection. “Don’t act as if you know what you’re doing.”

  


* * *

  


> _FRANKFURT, Wednesday 11th August 2010 - For Immediate Release_
> 
> _Madrigal Electromotive GmbH acknowledges the unconfirmed reports in local, national and international media regarding its subsidiary concern Los Pollos Hermanos® and employees thereof._
> 
> _Madrigal can neither confirm nor deny informal allegations made against the late Gustavo Fring, who served as managing director of Los Pollos Hermanos until his death on August 2nd. Due to the serious nature of the claims, the Madrigal supervisory board has ordered an immediate suspension of business activity at all Los Pollos Hermanos premises until further notice._
> 
> _Madrigal has entered into a preliminary agreement with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration and intends to co-operate fully with city, state and federal investigative authorities. Madrigal’s corporate social responsibility policy prioritises transparency, accountability, and compliance with external regulation at all levels. The supervisory board is considering a proposed review of anti-corruption measures and will appoint a committee to conduct internal investigations if necessary._

  
“So, someone’s gotta be trying to frame him, right? That’s what it looks like.”

“I don’t really know what’s going on,” says Lydia, truthfully.

“I mean, I’m reading articles where they’re trying to make out he had some kind of… like he was working for one of the Mexican drug cartels, and that’s where this “blue meth” was coming from…” Teresa’s tone is incredulous, as if she isn’t even going to try to reconcile this information with her prior knowledge of Gus, model citizen and consummate gentleman. “My God, if you ask me, it’s just distasteful, publishing that kind of thing right after someone dies.”

“Yes. Yes, it is.” Lydia takes a deep breath, trying to quell her nausea.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have… you must be feeling just— I can’t even imagine right now.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“I know you and Gus were close.”

“Yes, we were.” Lydia glances towards the door of her office. “Teresa, I really should get going, I’ve got a report to—”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. Go on, I’m sorry. I’ll talk to you later.”

Lydia slips inside her office, calmly closes the blinds, sits down and lays her head on her desk. It’s a quarter to nine.

 

In the end, after three days of sympathetic looks, innocent questions and increasingly detailed news reports, what sets her off is nothing at all. Nothing meaningful. She’s only waiting to turn out of the CVS parking lot when a car passes too close behind her, startling her, and that’s nothing, but it’s enough.

Lydia concentrates on the sensation of her hands grasping the wheel and not the creeping slithering tightness in her chest, not the pathetic animal urge to get out and run. She tells herself that she’s not trapped, it only feels like it, and that she’s only three miles from home. She can survive for three more miles. Still, by the time the light changes at the intersection she’s dizzy from hyperventilating and her whole body is taut, flooded with adrenaline. She edges onto the interstate in blinding heat and is convinced, the whole way, that this is how she’s going to die. Steering wheel through the chest. Crushed against the curving concrete barrier by an eighteen-wheeler. The words she mouths to herself, trying to talk herself through it, are Gus’ words or Mike’s words. Remember where you are, Lydia. Keep it together. You’re driving south on 610 and taking exit 6 for Bellaire Boulevard. You’ve done it a thousand times and you’re not going to die.

When she pulls up in her driveway, her eyes are stinging and her hair is damp with sweat, and her breathing is so loud and ragged in the small sealed space of the car that she curses at herself. The lights are on inside the house, glowing warmly in the living room. Thinking of Delores and Kiira, she reaches into her purse for the Ativan she hardly ever takes — _up to three per day as needed for anxiety_ , the label reads, it’s printed right beneath her name and a date some ten months ago — and tips out two of the small tablets and swallows them dry. The heavy summer sky grows darker in the five minutes it takes for her hands to stop shaking.

It’s only after she’s put Kiira to bed that it really kicks in and she realises, getting up from the table where she and Delores have been eating dinner, that her head is spinning and she needn’t or shouldn’t have taken two at once. Her hand finds the back of the chair before she knows she's swaying, and she quickly sits back down.

“Miss Lydia?”

"I'm all right, Delores," Lydia says, suddenly conscious of how her voice is dragging a little, smoothed out, slowed down. She feels insulated and deeply, artificially calm. "I'm just a little dizzy." 

Delores is looking her over with focused concern, touching her forehead and gazing into her eyes, and Lydia feels momentarily confused. She's fine. She's just very tired. 

"I took some Ativan before I came in,” Lydia says, by way of an explanation. “I must've... the label said three tablets, up to three a day, and I took two, and I guess one would have been enough.”

She’s embarrassed, but in a numb, distant sort of way. She needn’t mention what the Ativan is for. Delores knows, as a matter of principle, exactly what medicines are stored in the house and where, because the bathroom cabinet may be too high for Kiira to reach but you can’t be too careful.

“Two,” Delores repeats.

“I haven’t taken it in a long time.” Leaning on the table, Lydia lets her eyes fall closed and feels Delores reach for her wrist. “I was… distracted. I wasn’t thinking.”

Delores presses two fingers to her radial pulse, and she notices how very slowly her heart is beating. This is why she hardly ever takes the pills: they put her in a quiet place where all she wants to do is curl in on herself and sink into sleep, and she can’t afford that, not with a sixty-hour work week and a child to take care of. Not when Kiira might need her in the middle of the night—

“Lydia, do I need to call poison control?”

“Wh—?” Lydia sits up and tries to meet Delores’ eyes, tries to see straight. “No, no. I only took two. That’s not gonna hurt me.”

Delores looks at her very carefully.

“I know it’s not any of my business,” she says, “but these past two weeks… you’ve had a terrible shock, and now you’re running yourself into the ground. You’re going to make yourself ill like this.”

“Yeah,” Lydia murmurs, without thinking. All the resistance has gone out of her. Her guard is coming down, and she can’t afford that, but she can’t think clearly enough to counter it. “No, I-I mean… this, just… it all just came out of nowhere and I… I wasn’t ready for it.”

Delores is shaking her head. “Come on, now. You need to rest. You’re not thinking straight.”

Maybe this is what it means to break down, Lydia thinks. Not a sudden snap, just everything slipping and shifting out of place until she can’t hold together any more. She promised Gus she wouldn’t, and yet here she is. She imagines saying _I was with him_ , in the same way that when looking down from a high place it’s hard not to imagine the fall. What scares people about heights is they know how easy it would be to jump. Not the fall that kills you but the landing, right? Prison. Kiira seeing her through a glass wall once or twice a year, with a different care worker or foster parent every time. _I was with him. I was in on it. I knew everything_. For a few seconds, it would be a relief, and then the ground would rush up to obliterate her.

After that, she starts to lose track. At some point she’s trying to explain, to tell Delores how she thought she was ready and she wasn’t, but Delores is frowning as if none of what she says makes any sense. She’s weeping slowly and soundlessly, too tired to really cry. Delores calls someone after all, poison control or a 24-hour doctor, and Lydia sits quiet and passive throughout the questioning. Nothing comes of it; she insists, again and again, that she’s fine. She’s glad for it when Delores takes over, walks her down the hall, and sits with her as she falls asleep.

For once, she doesn't dream of anywhere at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Juarez Cartel mentioned in this chapter is part of the fictional Breaking Bad universe, and is not related to the real-life organisation of the same name.


	5. Honour In All Things

While folding his laundry, Mike found a rip in the outer shell of the jacket he wore out at Petersen's place. It's a little disappointing— the jacket's barely a few years old— but nothing that can't be fixed. The sleeve has come away from the body at the armhole, leaving a gap a few inches long. Awake early on a cloudy Saturday morning, waiting for the coffee to drip through the filter, Mike puts his reading glasses on— they'll still do for close work, albeit not as well as they used to— and threads a needle. Twelve stitches to the inch, his mother told him once as she sewed at the kitchen table. He wondered at the time why it mattered, how anyone would be looking, but it sounded important. He measures it with the first joint of his thumb, from the tip of the nail to the knuckle, twelve stitches worth. You start on your right, supporting the cloth with your left hand, and work from right to left. He waxes the thread first and smooths it down to keep it from knotting. He ties it off an inch from the end, looping it in a delicate half-hitch too small to see, and starts to sew along the light line of pinpricks where the original stitches were torn out.

Jesse's problem— well, one of them, anyway— is that he can't keep his mind quiet. He chain-smokes and he taps his feet and frays the edges of his cuffs like he’s afraid that if he stays still for too long, all manner of awful things will catch up with him. Half-remembered proverbs about idle hands come to mind. Lydia's just as bad. Always moving, always fidgeting, her eyes darting around looking for the cracks in things, her mind whirring away. When he first met her, she had a firm, cold handshake, the practised kind, something she'd probably taught herself thinking you had to be assertive to get ahead. She carried all five feet of herself very stiff and straight, and her sharp-shouldered jacket made her look sleek and angular instead of insubstantial. She was clearly very clever, very purposeful, jittery as hell, and scared of her own shadow. Mike wasn't sure how she'd manage in their particular field, but it wasn’t his call to make, and after a while it became clear that Gus was extraordinarily good at settling her down. He kept her off the payroll and cultivated the idea that they were friends who saw each other for dinner every now and then and went to private views at art galleries together and that sort of thing, and looking at the two of them in public, Mike could see why people bought it. It’s far from convenient, having one of the lynchpins of the whole enterprise stuck all the way out in Houston with no network to rely on any more and nobody to talk her down in a crisis, but it served them well before everything fell apart.

Mike tries not to think of Lydia as a kid, though she was born the same year as his son. The ironic thing about working in an enterprise such as this is you end up knowing everything about everyone, as if you’re all crammed in together like sardines. Having taken account of pages and pages of tersely worded medical records, he knows things about Lydia that she may not know herself. She doesn’t have a lot of personal attachments, which was a point of discussion before she was hired. Gus wanted to know what she had in the way of family, and there was a short, blunt answer to that question: former ward of the state, no living relatives, no partner, and a child far too young to understand anything they might overhear. That profile has its advantages, but certainly she got very, very close to Gus by the end. Perhaps she thought of him as invulnerable. Gus had a protective way of touching her on the hand or shoulder, little gestures that few people would notice and that would read as simply friendly to anyone who did, and he would speak to her in a tone that seemed designed not to startle. He was patient with her. He must have thought patience best served his purposes.

Mike taught Jesse how to shoot, but he never got that far with Lydia. “Rule number one: assume every gun is loaded,” he’d told her, but she was already looking at the pistol in his hands as if it were a living thing that might leap up and bite her. Lydia was very attached to the idea of being safe, and yet didn’t seem able to connect that with the reality of keeping herself safe, the part that involved applying for a concealed handgun license and measuring herself for a holster she could wear under her suits. She just didn’t want a gun in the same house as her kid, and that was the bottom line. Mike could understand that, but there wasn’t much point in keeping one elsewhere: a gun in a locker at the local range won’t do you any good when someone’s trying to pull you off the sidewalk and into his car, he’d said. Instead of bridling, Lydia had looked as if she understood that part very well.

He hadn’t addressed the crux of it with either of them, the part that a lot of people, in his experience, can’t get past: could you kill someone to protect yourself? Usually, the look in a person’s eyes changes when you ask them that. With Lydia, though, it didn’t seem to be the real issue, and with Jesse, the question was already answered. Mike wants to tell Jesse to get out of the business while he can because he’s smart enough to have a decent shot at something better, and because everything that happens Jesse carries with him, layer upon layer of it. At his age, Mike thinks, you can’t afford that: your past will cave in on you and crush you if you let it. You patch yourself up and you keep going.

  


* * *

  
“How’s the kid doing?”

“Brock? He’s… he’s good, yeah,” says Jesse, looking up from his plate. The thought brings a tentative smile to his face. “Yeah, he’s doing a lot better. Probably gonna go back to school on Monday, actually. He would’ve gone back already but Andrea said she wanted to keep him home, you know, just to be on the safe side.”

“Of course.”

“Hey, how’s your, uh…” Jesse indicates his side.

“It’s mending.”

“I wasn’t expecting you to call,” says Jesse, after a few more bites of hashbrowns. He’s energetic and a little nervous, but as far as Mike can tell there’s no chemical edge to his restlessness this time, and at least he’s putting away a decent meal. “I figured you might still be planning on getting out of town, you know?”

“Not just yet.”

“That’s good,” Jesse says. “I was kinda worried when you said that. I mean, it’s like I said: we never would have pulled all that off without you.”

Mike wonders how it reflects on him that Jesse sees him as essential to the commission of insane stunts like the one they pulled last week. Something about the whole thing still strikes him as distasteful, them going out of their way to make life difficult for whichever cops were unlucky enough to be on duty that night. Still, better a magnet than a bomb. _Incendiary device_ , indeed. De-escalation, that’s his job. There has to be at least one person in the room capable of talking Walter down.

“We got very lucky indeed,” Mike says, looking Jesse firmly in the eye. “If I were you I wouldn’t get used to it.”

“No, no, I get that. Obviously.”

Loyola’s on a Saturday morning is quiet enough that they shouldn’t be overheard, but busy enough to obscure their conversation in case anyone’s listening. Mike lets him eat in silence for a few more moments before getting to his point.

"Now, as you know, I've had my ear to the ground regarding the APD, and in the past couple of days I've heard some things that have gotten me very concerned,” Mike says. “You want to tell me why you were talking to those cops about ricin?" 

Jesse goes still, and his mouth drops open a fraction, and his eyes when he looks up are like an animal's eyes, caught in the headlights. That one word did it. Mike knows he's on to something now, much as he would rather not be. _Ricin_. No wonder those cops were talking about getting the FBI involved.

"There’s nothing to tell," says Jesse, putting his knife and fork down. "I don't know anything about it, it just… I must’ve gotten it stuck in my memory from somewhere, and when Andrea told me Brock was sick, it just came back to me and I figured, since the doctors didn't know what was wrong—”

"Jesse, answer the question." 

Jesse leans back in his seat, crossing his arms, looking everywhere but at Mike. 

"It was… it was for Tuco," he says, quietly. "You know, Tuco Salamanca? He, uh… when me and Mr. White first started cooking, we made a deal with him, right before we found out he was a total whack-job who wanted to kidnap us and send us both to Mexico. He was crazy, Mike. We saw him beat one of his own dudes to death for, like, speaking out of turn. After that, we knew it was only a matter of time before you know, it was us… and Mr. White, he thought the best thing to do was to…” Jesse makes a non-committal gesture. “Like a pre-emptive strike." 

"A pre-emptive strike. Is that what he called it?" 

"I don't know what he called it, it was like a year ago… all I know is, I’d bought a gun, but Mr. White said it was a bad idea and his plan would be a better bet. He cooked it up from some, uh…" Jesse pauses as if he's reaching for a word he knows well. "Castor beans, right? And he showed it to me, all telling me not to touch it, and talking about how dangerous it was. He said part of what makes it so bad is it just looks like the flu, right? Just like a really bad flu. Or— or a heart attack. And the doctors won't figure it out until it's too late. So… yeah, that's what we were gonna do. We just never managed to get him to take the stuff. And when Brock got sick, Andrea said it looked like he had the flu, and it all just came back to me." 

Mike remembers more than one ricin envelope being mailed to the Philadelphia Police Department during his time there. All fake, of course, but that didn't make it any less sickening. He's not surprised Walter knew how to make the stuff; what concerns him is if he's done it once, there's hardly anything stopping him from trying it again. Castor beans aren't that hard to come by. Something about Jesse's account feels fresher, more easily remembered than it should. Some days Mike's surprised the kid has as sharp a recall as he does, what with the meth and the heroin and God knows what else. 

"I've got two pieces of advice for you," Mike says, as Jesse fidgets with a paper napkin and doesn’t quite look him in the eye. "First of all, there are certain words you don't want to mention to the police unless it's a matter of life or death—" 

"It _was_ life or death, Mike. That little kid was in the ICU on a goddamn ventilator." 

"I appreciate that, and nonetheless, ricin is one of them. At best it’s gonna make you look very sketchy indeed, at worst you’ll wake up to find the FBI on your doorstep with a search warrant and a battering ram.”

He waits for Jesse to meet his eyes before continuing.

“More pertinently, if a man has it in him to use poison and then swear up and down that he's innocent, you oughta think very carefully before putting your trust in him." 

"Well, what about Gus?” Jesse retorts. “You knew what he was gonna do with that tequila, right? How's that different?" 

"I’ll tell you how it’s different: because you’re right, I knew what he was gonna do. He explained it to me in great detail. And in the context in which we were working, yes, I trusted him.”

He doesn’t go into the matter of how he trusted Gus; he considers it among things that can only be taught by experience. There was a professional understanding in that relationship, and there were limits. With Jesse it’s all too black and white. He’d rather be able to divide everyone up into allies and enemies and draw clear lines between them, because he feels safer that way.

Mike wants, again, to tell him to get out while he can.

  


* * *

  
Saul's office has a brand-new-looking pane of glass in the door, marked only by a few sets of fingerprints near the handle, its cleanness contrasting with the usual clutter of Saul's desk and the mess of file boxes spread out across the floor, interspersed with garishly coloured pieces of luggage and a few unidentifiable SkyMall gadgets, like Saul was trying to put everything back after some scare threw his office into disarray and decided halfway through to reorganise the place while he was at it. One of the lower wall panels is still slightly askew. 

"Good to see you!" says Saul, so cheerfully that Mike feels tired just listening to him. "Now, you understand I didn't hear anything about anything, okay? And what may or may not have been happening south of the border—" Saul sweeps his hands out in front of him. "None of my business. But I've gotta tell you, Mike, when the kid came back all on his lonesome, I was worried. Truly, I was." 

"Hm." 

"Anyway." Saul's eyes are nervous, and he's gesturing as if he's keeping Mike at arm's length. "I won't ask. Things were looking about six different shades of apocalyptic for a while, but you-know-who gave the DEA the slip, no one made it to Agent Schrader, and the kid's all right, so no harm, no foul. But, ah… my condolences regarding Mr. Fring. That sounded like a pretty dicey situation on all fronts." 

The thing about Saul is that he knows full well how ridiculous it sounds when these things come out of his mouth, and yet it never seems to stop him. He's sleazy as hell, of course, but at least he doesn't try to pretend otherwise. 

"Anyway. Water under the bridge. What can I do for you?" 

"I understand you've got something set aside for me."

Saul nods. "If you’ll excuse me for just a moment…" He rifles through one of the cupboards in the wall— Mike notices its hinge is crooked— and comes back with a thick black bag, the contents of which make up Mike’s off-the-books severance package.

"Now, if you wanted me to wire it into your usual account, you'd have to wait a few days for that to go through… much as I'd like to provide an expedited access service, I'm just not outfitted for it yet. Unless—" 

"I’ll take it in cash, Saul." 

"Well, that simplifies things." Saul hands over the bag and motions to the coffee table. "I figure you’re going to want to make sure everything’s in order…”

“I am.”

As Saul makes a token effort to clear some of the clutter off the table, Mike takes a seat and fishes his reading glasses out of his pocket. 

"If I may offer a thought…" Saul ventures, waving illustratively with his fountain pen while Mike unpacks bundles of notes. "That's a pretty good windfall right there, but with regard to setting yourself up for the long term… well, your primary income stream has come to an abrupt end, and I don't imagine Social Security will go a long way towards filling the gap."

"I've been paying into Social Security since since I was a kid," Mike says. "I put twenty-five years into my pension plan back in Philadelphia—” it strikes him as absurd in a way, thinking of all those tidy monthly payments he made all those years ago as he handles tens of thousands of dollars in cash, “—and per the government, I’ll reach full retirement age this winter. I'm not worried about making ends meet."

"Well, good, good. Sounds like you've got it all figured out. However, as your legal counsel, it would be irresponsible of me not to mention that anything you receive from either the restaurant or the parent company is going to be up for grabs if the DEA start looking your way, which, under the circumstances…" Saul laughs ruefully. “I wouldn’t bank on them leaving any stone unturned.”

“Is there a point you want to make here?”

Saul claps his hands together smartly. “ _Opportunities_. That’s my point. With your unique skillset, who’s to say you couldn’t find a desirable location to ply your trade away from prying eyes? Now, I’m not talking about any of the heavy stuff, mind you, I’m just saying—” he emphasises, pointing his pen at Mike— “there’s always going to be a healthy demand for PIs. Think about it.”

“Mm. And how exactly would it serve you to have me out of town?”

“ _Serve_ me?” says Saul, affecting a nervous scoff. “Why, I’d be bereft. We all would. All I ask is that you consider the benefits of moving your operation somewhere nice and quiet until the heat dies down.”

“It’s not like you to be this worried about blowback,” Mike says. “Is there something going on that you aren’t telling me about?”

“Now who said anything about blowback?” Saul sputters. “I say this only as a matter of principle—”

“Because if there is, you can either tell me about it now, or we can dance around the subject until I lose my patience, and I don’t think either of us would like that very much.”

“Okay, okay, _maybe_ recent events have left some of us feeling a little bit skittish,” Saul allows, “but that’s all there is to it. Right hand to— look, I learned my lesson after that bit of unpleasantness a few months ago, with the… anyway. Let’s not get paranoid, all right?”

 

The word from his contact at the DEA is that evidence is still being processed— mountains of it, apparently— and that ASAC Merkert is most probably going to be let go. No one’s been called in for questioning yet, but they’ll redouble their efforts to make it happen; a few noteworthy arrests would help them save face. Mike thinks he’ll know when it’s time for him to pack up and leave for good, and that moment hasn’t yet come, but Saul perhaps had a point about the benefits of keeping his head down. Late on Saturday evening, he calls Chris Mara.

"I've got a job for you. Down in Houston." 

"What kind of cover does she need?" 

"Just shadowing, for the moment. Short term. I imagine it's going to be pretty quiet, but she's out on her own down there and it's not ideal.” And, he doesn’t say, she’s been acting fragile enough to concern him. “I'd feel better having eyes on her house, probably the office as well."

Mike was unsure whether to tell Lydia about this planned detail— the way she's been lately it might just make her more jumpy, and he doesn’t completely trust her not to draw attention to herself knowing that there are undercover bodyguards in her vicinity— but when he’d called her, she’d sounded oddly calm about it all. Not calm, exactly, more distant. She’d agreed to his proposal with a note of relief, as if having armed men waiting on her street would actually make her feel safer, and told him in flat tones about the most recent call from her man in Germany. It sounded as if Madrigal were preparing to close ranks.

"Is there anyone who might want to get to her?"

Mike thinks of the shots that skimmed past the car at Petersen’s place and remembers the pure bewildered panic in Lydia’s eyes, and feels a twinge of conscience that he can’t quite put a name to. Those men, slipshod and poorly organised as they were, were unknown quantities, and he doesn’t much care for unknown quantities.

"If I knew of anyone, I'd have dealt with them already, but you should be prepared just in case."

  


* * *

  


> _  
> FRING “GROOMED YOUNG CHEMISTS FOR DRUG RING”_
> 
> _SAN ANTONIO, Tex.— Gustavo Fring may have funded a chemistry scholarship at the University of New Mexico in order to recruit skilled scientists for a multi-million-dollar drug smuggling operation, according to sources close to the Drug Enforcement Administration._
> 
> _The Chilean-born restaurateur, who was killed in the Casa Tranquila bombing on August 2nd, is alleged to have long-standing ties to the Mexican drug cartels responsible for some of Central America’s most brutal conflicts in recent history. It is believed that Mr. Fring’s chain of fast-food restaurants, Los Pollos Hermanos, served as a front for the wholesale distribution of crystal methamphetamine, the highly addictive Schedule II drug which has devastated communities across the United States since the 1980s. Once regarded as an act of philanthropy, Mr. Fring’s sponsorship of the Maximino Arciniega Memorial Scholarship Fund is now being highlighted as a sign of his alleged links to drug trafficking and clandestine chemistry. References to the scholarship have recently been removed from the UNM web site. Undergraduate students enrolling at UNM for the 2010-11 academic year face tuition charges of up to $20,143, and it is unknown whether currently enrolled Arciniega Scholars will be offered alternative sources of financial aid. At press time, staff at the university's Financial Aid Office were unavailable for comment._
> 
> _A spokesperson for the Albuquerque Police Department declined to comment on rumors linking Mr. Fring to former Arciniega Scholar and UNM graduate Gale Boetticher, who was shot dead in his Albuquerque home on March 25th…_

  
It’s quiet work. Mike’s rented a car from a local agency, which makes the job more complicated than it needs to be, but in this kind of wary suburban neighborhood he can’t rule out being noticed, and people tend to remember out-of-state license plates. Still, there are a handful of cars parked out on the street, and the trees lining the sidewalks afford enough shade and cover that he can find several good vantage points without making himself conspicuous. He’s a few pages into the newspaper and Lydia’s car is still in her driveway when his phone vibrates in his pocket.

“There’s something you should know about,” says Chris. “We may have a problem.”


	6. Many Good Ways South

_Record high temperatures are expected across southeastern Texas and into western Louisiana over the next seventy-two hours_ , the newscasters are saying, and even in this air-conditioned conference room the heat is numbing. The sun was already hammering on the glass walls of the building when the meeting convened some two and a half hours ago. Now all the blinds are shut against the glare, and the light inside the room has a dull tawny quality. The discussion started out formal and focused and has slowly unravelled. Jackets are being draped over the backs of chairs, ties are being loosened, the agenda has long since been put aside, people are starting to talk over each other. The man currently speaking has a flat dry unhurried voice that makes it sound as if the meeting could stretch out forever and it would be all the same to him. Something about it makes Lydia feel increasingly woozy the longer she tries to listen to him. She keeps catching and then losing the thread of what he’s saying.

“…proposed audits here and in Long Beach… in the interim, there was a suggestion that, uh… some of the traffic might be shifted over to the Atlanta office…”

“It’s not a logistics issue,” someone is repeating, too forcefully. “It’s not a logistics issue.”

Lydia reaches for the glass of water in front of her. The room is spinning slightly. She couldn’t bring herself to eat anything at breakfast this morning, although for Kiira’s sake she usually makes a point of it— children will pick up habits without understanding them— and she felt fine until suddenly she didn’t. She longs to retreat to her office, on the cooler west-facing side of the block, where the thermostat rarely rises above sixty-eight degrees. _We’re looking at an area of high pressure that’s relatively slow-moving yet still is expected to lead to some thunderstorms in the coming days as it moves southwest into the Gulf of Mexico…_

“Ultimately if, uh… ultimately the damages would be assessed within the restaurant division and they would be dealt with accordingly… I’m principally concerned about the impact in the next quarter but one…”

“Quarter two twenty-eleven,” someone murmurs, noting it down, like a child copying from a blackboard.

A hand slaps a stack of paper on the table. “It’s not on us. This shouldn’t be on us. That’s what I keep telling you.”

“This is coming down from the supervisory board,” the dry-voiced man reminds him.

“Okay,” Lydia says, in a tone calibrated to get everyone to quiet down and listen to her, because if she hears _it’s not a logistics issue_ one more time she’s going to scream. “We’ve established there’s going to be an audit, which I think is more than reasonable, given the circumstances, and it should go without saying that if anything untoward is happening in my division, I want to know about it. Look at this as an opportunity to examine our supply chains and see what we can improve on.” No one counters her, or no one has the energy.

“I read in yesterday’s news they think Fring might have been at it since as far back as the late eighties, early nineties,” another man pipes up. The group murmurs; someone whistles. “Hand in hand with the drug cartels. Sold Herzog a shell company. I mean, Jesus Christ.”

Lydia takes another drink, although the water, unfiltered, tastes chalky and chlorinated to her. They’ve been talking about Gus since the meeting began, and after the first exquisite jolts of panic, her nerves stabilised. 

“As we know, the police and the DEA and the FBI are working to understand the scope of the situation,” she says. “They’re dedicating a lot of resources to it, they’ve appointed us a liaison, and I think it’s best if we get our information from them, rather than letting ourselves be influenced by external commentary. There has been a lot of speculation, a lot of hearsay… so please, let’s not lose sight of the facts.”

“You never noticed anything off about the restaurant’s numbers?” asks the manager sitting across from her, to the left of Teresa. “Delivery volumes not adding up or anything like that?”

“I was never in a position to notice,” Lydia says carefully, making eye contact with the speaker. What he means is _how could anyone not notice something like this?_ , and she’s not sure whether the slight is intentional. “You understand I only ever had a passing familiarity with Mr. Fring’s business. I knew him personally.”

The room has gone very quiet, she thinks. In the hush she can make out the individual strokes of the clock on the far wall. She can feel all their eyes on her and she senses that they want her to go on; they are all more interested in this scandal than they pretend to be.

“I thought of him as a friend,” Lydia ventures, crossing her arms to guard herself. “Gus Fring was a… a very private person, but yes, I knew him well, or at least I thought I did. This has all come as a great shock to me, and I’m still trying to understand it.”

She has to suppress a flinch, announcing these things to a room full of people, but they’re looking at her with sympathy. Her colleagues, like Delores, think she’s merely suffering from the stress of an impossible situation, and though the perception is humiliating it could work to her advantage, up to a point; she can’t let them think she’s incapable. Lydia takes a deliberate breath and folds her hands to hide their shaking. Her chest is uncomfortably tight and she can feel the heat sapping the colour from her face, but she is composed and contained and the words are coming easily. An incomplete truth is always easier than a falsehood, and with this careful transparency she has the whole group in thrall to her now.

“Let me reiterate: if he was able to carry out these activities within a trusted subsidiary without prompting any suspicion, the implications for Madrigal are… they, well, I—I hardly need to explain how serious they are. We need to be looking to repair the damage any way we can.”

General nods of assent. Lydia’s vision swims sharply, and she pauses for breath again. She needs to get out of this room. She directs her attention to the agenda in front of her, scanning the series of items and wondering how it has taken these people an interminable two and a half hours to get through them all.

“Well. I’ll be reviewing some of these projections in light of what we know about the audit, but for now, it looks to me like we’ve covered everything,” she suggests, glancing up and down the table. Who was chairing the meeting, anyway?

“You want to adjourn?” asks the woman seated two places to her left.

“Is there anything else?” Lydia asks the room. Mercifully, no one speaks up.

“All right, meeting adjourned,” the woman says, and the note-taker softly echoes her, “adjourned eleven forty-five a.m.,” laboriously, amid the scraping back of chairs, and Lydia bends her head forward and straightens out the sheaf of papers in her hands. Deep breaths. She doesn’t quite trust herself to stand up, but no one’s looking at her any more except Teresa, who comes up next to her and discreetly leans down to talk as the room clears.

“Are you feeling all right?” she whispers.

“It’s just this heat,” Lydia admits, resting her forehead in one hand.

“Should I go get someone?” A first aider, she means. Does she look that bad?

“No, thank you,” Lydia says, as firmly as she can manage, and adds as a concession, “I just need a minute… I thought I’d go down to the break room.”

She stands, slowly, and Teresa’s hand hovers behind her back as she tries to get her bearings. Truly, she feels relieved more than anything. She got through the meeting and she didn’t give herself away, and that besides Mike’s presence in Houston gives her a thin sense of security. The next few hours look more manageable now, if she can just find somewhere cool and quiet to sit and rest first. Maybe eat something, though she’s not hungry, or rather it seems too complicated at the moment. Teresa is studying her, brow furrowed.

“You do that. I’ll see that no one bothers you there… actually, you know what, let me come down with you. I’ve got to eat lunch, anyway.”

The hallway is narrow and crowded, but Teresa steers Lydia out of the room and into the nearest elevator without being obvious about it.

“My God, that room is a suntrap, huh?” she says, pressing the button for the third floor. Lydia leans against the wall, blinking hard; her vision is going patchy. “I was starting to think they’d go on all afternoon… Lydia, honey, take my arm. You look like you’re going to pass out on me any second now.”

“Please, Teresa…” Lydia starts to say, and finds that there isn’t enough air in her lungs. “I'm not…”

She hates this feeling, and hates especially that through her own carelessness she’s become familiar with it. Allowing Teresa to hold onto her, she breathes deeply and grits her teeth and clenches her fists until the doors slide open again, and then in a daze she concentrates very hard on putting one foot in front of the other until they reach the break room. Teresa makes her sit down and presses a cold bottle of water into her hands, and gradually her head clears.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to get someone?”

Lydia shakes her head and drinks deeply. Not if she can help it.

“I’ll be fine. Thank you.”

She has braced herself for more questions about Gus, but Teresa isn’t asking. As Lydia sits and gathers herself, she pages through her copy of the agenda, skimming over items like _projected impact of assets forfeiture_ , _effect on accountability policy_ , _strategies for interim stabilisation_ , the violent collapse of Gus’s organisation distilled into the driest possible terms.

“I still can’t believe it,” she remarks, and folds the cover over with a snap. “I just can’t believe it. What a nightmare.”

 

Behind the common area there is a small adjoining room with a locking door and a couch where Lydia stretches out, resting her head in her arms, thinking maybe if she can force herself to eat something she’ll feel better. It’s not even noon yet; this is deeply frustrating. Teresa kept looking at her in that concerned way as if she didn’t think Lydia should be at work at all but Lydia finds it absolutely necessary to be here. The stillness of home during the daytime makes her restless, and she’s afraid that if she hides away for too long the rest of the world will set her aside and move on without her. Lydia has long since learnt not to need anybody but herself and still she feels loneliness as a sort of hollowness she might be able to crush if she tries hard enough, makes herself hard and taut and good enough.

After a few minutes, she’s drowsy. The Advil in her purse would ease her headache but she doesn’t feel like getting up to retrieve it. On Friday night after taking the Ativan that left the evening blurred and fragmented she slept for fourteen hours straight, she didn’t even stir until Delores came in to check on her in the middle of Saturday, and still it barely touched the weeks of sleep debt she’s carrying. Fourteen hours of fathomless calm blankness. Until she woke up and realised what a pathetic state she’d been in, breaking down in front of Delores and then not even remembering half of what she’d said, it was comfortable. According to Delores she had been distraught and barely cogent, _I’ve never seen you like that before_ she said, and at that point her own fallibility seemed like a trap opened up underneath her, but something tells her that Delores wouldn’t have believed her if she had told the truth, not that night, and perhaps not ever.

Lying under the ceiling fan, Lydia rests in a cool column of air. She told herself she’d only take fifteen minutes in this room but it’s probably been twenty or thirty. On the radio they were saying something about rain by Friday, _we’re still looking at highs around minimum ninety, ninety-five degrees but if this cold front continues to move northwest there’s a high likelihood of squalls and showers towards the end of the week_ , Kiira was practicing the days of the week in Spanish and her voice winds its way in, _lunes, martes, miércoles, jueves_ …

She’s roused by a soft knock at the door and quickly sits up, placing her stockinged feet on the floor.

“Lydia?”

Teresa peers in.

“I’m sorry, I know I said I was going to leave you alone, but I’ve got Peter Schuler on the line and he says it’s urgent.” She holds out the handset, covering the receiver, as Lydia for a fraction of a second reaches automatically for the burner phone in her purse. “From the restaurant division…?” she adds, as if thinking Lydia’s memory has lapsed.

“Yes, of course. I’ll take it in here. Thank you.”

“Are you alone?” Schuler simply asks. His voice is heavy and worn.

Lydia waits to hear the outer door click shut as Teresa leaves. “Yes.”

“I need you to help me settle an account.”

  


* * *

  


Albuquerque, being some five thousand feet above sea level, feels slightly but perceptibly different to her, especially early in the year when the thin, dry air seems sharpened by the cold. Gus has lived in mountain cities since he was young; once you adapt to the altitude, he explains, you don’t notice it. The night sky seems massive here, and somehow closer to the earth than it does at home. The evening has a comfortable chill to it, something like a shadow left by snow.

“I reviewed the figures you gave me about the operation in Tamaulipas,” Lydia begins, warming her hands around her cup of tea. “At present, they’re willing to pay up to twelve thousand dollars per gallon for what we’re offering. What if I could raise that?”

Gus looks at her with only the slightest shift in expression.

“How do you propose to do that?” he asks lightly.

“They’re still relying on the Pacific ports for precursor, and they won’t pay a premium for phenylacetic acid as long as they have a steady supply of ephedrine. Cut down the supply, and they’ll be forced to switch to your alternative process. Not all at once, of course, it would have to be done gradually, but as long as you know the right people, and I presume that you do…”

Lydia folds her coat more closely around herself and looks out at the garden, letting him consider it.

“I know people who can arrange for customs seizures in the western ports,” Gus says, after a few moments of contemplation. “Are you confident that that wouldn’t jeopardise your own shipments?”

“We’d have to be careful, of course… but we only receive cargo there once or twice a month, and I can give you exact dates to work from,” says Lydia, leaning in. “The group we’re talking about imported forty-five short tons of ephedrine last year. Now, I’m not an expert on these processes, but assuming you could offer them an equivalent quantity of phenylacetic acid, your estimated gross would be in the high nine figures. Besides, if they stopped importing through the western states, they’d reduce their risk. It would be beneficial to both parties.”

Lydia doesn’t expect Gus to be convinced by the figures alone — profit must be weighed against deeper strategic objectives — but there is a satisfying neatness to the calculations. When the idea occurred to her, she saw it as a problem to solve and simply worked through it to its conclusion.

“You open up a new route, running from south Texas through Matamoros to Altamira,” Lydia continues. “You control the flow of goods both ways, centrally, which will allow you to improve security and streamline your supply chain. And when the time comes to end the relationship with Juarez, you’ll have strengthened your position by limiting their access to precursor, and the Tamaulipas cartel will be better placed to expand into their territory.”

“It’s a volatile region, as you know,” Gus observes. “Creating a monopoly could be risky.”

“I’m not proposing a monopoly, only a restriction. You would use your best judgement, of course.”

Gus looks thoughtfully at her, his smile narrowing his eyes a fraction. Is there an undertone of pride there?

“The cartel leaders can be conservative,” he says. “They tend not to be interested in innovation unless the benefit to them is clearly demonstrated, but you know how to present your case… tell me, Lydia, are you looking for a more involved role in these negotiations?”

Lydia pauses. _That_ possibility hadn’t occurred to her. Perhaps this is Gus’s way of implying that she’s overstepped, but she can’t make out any hint of a rebuke in his expression, just reserved interest.

“I was only thinking about it from a— a technical point of view,” she says, honestly. “For security’s sake, I’m not sure negotiating would be… I mean, _within_ the organisation is one thing, but with third parties I would have concerns.”

“Of course,” Gus says. “I don’t think it would be wise. However, I would like to consult you more closely regarding these plans. Any such route would need to be overseen with great care and at a finer level of detail than I can manage alone. What you’re proposing would have been impossible for us twenty years ago; today, perhaps centralised control is more realistic. It all depends on the flow of information.”

“Yes,” says Lydia. She holds his gaze; she feels secure in their understanding, his logic interlocks so neatly with hers. “Yes, of course.”

“Let me think about it,” Gus says, favouring her with a warm look and leaning back in his seat. “You’ll have my answer within a few days.”


	7. Loose Cannon

“Delores? It’s me. I’m afraid I’m going to be late tonight. Something came up… yes, please, if you could. Thank you very much. I’m sorry to… no, no, don’t wait up. I’ll be lucky if I get out before midnight… yeah, it’s been happening a lot, and I really appreciate your understanding.”

Lydia leans against the window, slouching slightly, as if she’s afraid someone might be scouring the sea of freeway traffic for her specifically. Mike wishes she could shake this habit of expecting cameras everywhere; it doesn’t benefit her when she doesn’t really know where to look for them. She looks hollow around the eyes, visibly thinner than she was ten days ago. She keeps fidgeting with the hem of her skirt, smoothing it back into place whenever it shifts.

“Is this our exit or should I wait for the next one?” Mike asks her mainly for the sake of distracting her, indicating the sign up ahead.

“Wait,” says Lydia, leaning forward to read it. “But don’t get in lane for the airport. Take exit 30C for Pasadena and then double back. If you get off here, you’ll spend another half hour getting out of downtown.”

“You ever been to Philadelphia?” Mike asks, earning himself a nonplussed look. “I used to take the Schuylkill Expressway into work every morning. Made this look like a walk in the park.”

“How are you so calm?” Lydia finally asks him.

“Is that a serious question?”

Schuler’s told her what she has to do. Panicking about it won’t help.

This chemical plant is one of the smaller businesses in Lydia’s supply chain, but he doubts she’s ever set foot here before. Wire-mesh fences subdivide a flat spur of land between two bayous. The few cameras he spots are rusted in place. For being so close to the coast, there’s little trace of salt or ozone in the air, only a cloying humidity, tinted with something petrochemical.

Lydia keeps her sunglasses on inside the building, although the interior is lit below standard. She can’t help studying it anyway, and Mike can see from the tilt of her head that she’s looking the place up and down, dissatisfied. A man he presumes is the foreman nods and ushers them into a back office without a word.

Two men— professional types, young, well-dressed, names Robert Garcia and Jan Weber— stand up to shake hands with her. Only the taller one is definitely of the cartel; Mike takes the other for an affiliated go-between. He introduces himself in what sounds like a German accent overlaid by years in Mexico, and the way his jacket shifts betrays a holster at his waist.

“We appreciate your coming at such short notice,” Garcia begins.

“Yes, well,” says Lydia, nervously twisting her hands together. She has to force herself to hold eye contact with him. “I would like to make one thing clear: I’m not— no longer active in this business. When our contact called me I promised I would attend to this matter in his place, but I’m afraid I just can’t agree to these terms as they stand, it’s— it’s beyond the scope of what I can do.”

Garcia nods politely, unengaged. Lydia presses on.

“My company is facing a federal investigation on top of extensive internal reviews. Do you understand the magnitude of the risk I would be taking if I continued to supply you?”

Mike doesn’t quite like the look that passes between the two men at that.

“In any case, I was never the one in charge of the corridor. My associate managed it. The administration, the negotiation— it all fell to him.”

“We understand you’re in a position to manage it yourself,” Garcia says, making Lydia shift uncomfortably.

“I don’t know exactly what kind of control you think I had, but I…”

“Mr. Fring was a valued partner of ours, but we knew he wasn’t working alone. The corridor to Altamira is still viable, and we’d like to keep it that way.”

Lydia shrinks back from the table very slightly.

“Ms. Rodarte-Quayle,” Garcia presses, perhaps only to make her flinch.

“What exactly is it that you want from me?” Lydia asks, locking eyes with him again. 

“As you know, Mr. Schuler is facing arrest,” Garcia says. “The U.S. government is co-operating with German authorities on the preparation of a warrant, and it’s likely that he will be extradited to stand trial in the United States. He came to us seeking protection, and we came to a conditional agreement to ensure his safety.”

“He gave me up.”

“We’re looking to restore a steady supply of chemicals,” Garcia corrects. “He named you as the person who would be able to facilitate that.”

Lydia shakes her head slightly, looking bewildered.

“We can arrange Mr. Schuler’s safe passage to Mexico, but he won’t move until we give him the go-ahead. If we can’t come to an agreement regarding your continued services…” Garcia consults a slim black notebook. “On July twenty-fifth we paid Mr. Fring an advance on chemical shipments due through October, a total of fifteen million dollars… we would accept a repayment in full if you’re unable to supply us. You have twenty-four hours to decide, but you understand this is a matter of urgency.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” says Garcia, almost convincingly. “Ms. Rodarte-Quayle, we don’t have any reason to harm you. You were a great asset to Mr. Fring, and you would be a great asset to us.”

  


* * *

  


“Fifteen million dollars. Fifteen million. How am I supposed to—?”

Naturally, Lydia’s climbing the walls. Mike’s motel room is just long enough for her to pace up and down, which she has been doing repeatedly, flitting back and forth to peer out through the curtains and check the lock on the door. 

“Why aren’t they asking Schuler for it?”

“I assume they’ve already asked him for whatever he can put up front, otherwise they wouldn’t be wasting their time up here,” Mike says. “My guess is this fifteen million thing is just to make you feel like they’re giving you a choice instead of twisting your arm.”

Lydia sits down at the table where she’s set her laptop, typing a few lines and frowning at whatever comes up. Mike doesn’t think he needs to remind her that agreeing to send anything more down to Mexico would be an incredibly bad idea, and he isn’t going to ask her what she’s working on. Clutching at straws and little else, it looks like.

“They can’t seriously believe I would go to Mexico,” she mutters.

“Stranger things have happened. It’s a lot harder for the government to get to you once you’ve gotten into bed with a cartel. They’ve got mansions down there built like fortresses. Schuler’s probably going to be under armed guard day and night.”

“If I leave the country, it’ll be a matter of hours before I’m declared missing at which point they’ll shut down my access to the company servers, so there is no way I can do my job holed up in some bunker in Mexico or Guatemala or wherever it is they take people, Mike, they _must_ know that—”

“All right, all right, slow down,” Mike tells her. “You’re getting mixed up. They’re asking you to work for them up here, they will be well aware you can’t do it as a fugitive. Only thing is, they’re generously giving you another option, on account of how a lot of people in your position would rather end up in a bunker in Mexico than a prison cell.”

Lydia shuts her eyes.

“Are you saying I should take it?”

“Are you hearing yourself right now?” Mike scoffs. “The police aren’t looking for you yet, but if it comes to that— _if_ — you try and leave the country and you’ll be playing right into their hands. You’re a frequent flier, you’ve got business contacts all over the world… if you turn up at any border crossing, any checkpoint, even with a fake passport, you might as well be walking into a police station and turning yourself in, and that goes double if you’ve got your kid in tow.”

“Do you think they’re going to catch Schuler?”

“They’re probably going to catch him either way,” Mike says. “Much harder to disappear in Europe. Which reminds me of something… with regard to getting out of town…”

Mike flips open his wallet and pushes the dog-eared business card across the table.

“Make a note of that. As far as I know the guy doesn’t do out-of-state pickups, so you’d have to get to Albuquerque first, but should you require his services, you call that number and tell him you need ‘a new dust filter for a Hoover Max Extract Pressure Pro, Model 60’, and he’ll take it from there.”

“How much?”

“Last I heard, for two people, around a quarter million up front. Cash only.”

Lydia rubs her temples.

“That’s your worst-case scenario, understand? Don’t run scared until you have to.”

“How will I know when I have to?” Lydia asks.

“You’ll know.”

 

  


Around half past one in the morning, Lydia’s phone rings, startling her out of her reverie by the window. She’s been hunched over her laptop for hours, intermittently complaining about the risks she’s taking by accessing her servers over an unsecured connection or some such problem; not much else has been happening. Mike catches a few short words in German before she ends the call.

“Schuler killed himself,” she says flatly. She crosses the room and sits in front of him, framed in the lamplight, looking wrung out.

“When?”

“About a half hour ago. That was one of his go-betweens. According to her, he was at his office when the police came… he took an AED, a— a defibrillator, and…” Lydia shudders.

“You know what this means, don’t you?”

“What?”

“You’re off the hook.”

“You think?”

It seems obvious to him, but she’s asking sincerely.

“Call your guy and let him know the deal’s off,” Mike prompts her.

“And he’s just going to accept that?”

“Did those two look like cartel top brass to you? Their bosses probably sent them up here to see what they could finagle, but with Schuler dead, they’ve lost their leverage. They’re not going to come after you for fifteen million dollars you don’t have.”

“Okay,” Lydia says, uncertainly. “What then?”

“What then?”

Drive Lydia back to where her car’s parked, get a few hours of sleep, stick around for a day or so in case there’s any more trouble, then head back to Albuquerque. But if she needs to be walked through this, he’ll humour her.

“You go home,” Mike supplies. “You read your little girl a bedtime story, you get up in the morning and go to work like nothing happened. And you keep doing that. One day at a time.”

“One day at a time,” Lydia echoes bitterly, shaking her head but lacking the energy to really disagree.

She’s about to dial Garcia when she stops, frozen.

“All this time I thought it was the Salamancas who killed Gus,” she says, staring off into the middle distance. “Some— some kind of loyalists, maybe, even after the bloodline was destroyed there had to be someone left who could… but the Tamaulipas group wanted to take everything…”

“Now just wait a minute…”

“He told me— back when I pitched it to him he told me it was dangerous to create a monopoly,” Lydia mutters. “They saw their chance and they moved in and killed him because they knew he’d never give them full control of the route and now that there’s nothing left, they— it’s worth billions to them, Mike, billions…”

“You’re—” Mike pushes back his chair and steps in front of her, keeping her from pacing any further. “Lydia. Listen to me. What the hell has gotten into you?”

“They killed Gus,” Lydia continues, but weakening, “and now they’ve got Schuler and they’ve got me, and…”

Mike shakes his head. She looks lost.

“So it wasn’t them,” Lydia says, studying him, searching. “You know it wasn’t them. And it wasn’t the Salamancas. It was someone else, a third party, someone I don’t know about but maybe you do… and the only reason you’re not telling me, the only reason I can think of, is that you’re protecting someone.”

How much would she believe, Mike wonders, as bewildered as she is right now?

“I’m not protecting anybody,” Mike says. “But you’re right. It was someone else. Someone who’s since been taken care of. It happened while I was in Mexico, otherwise nobody ever would have gotten to him.”

Lydia shakes her head. “Taken care of, what—?”

“Lydia, listen to me,” Mike cuts in, putting his hands on her shoulders and speaking slowly and firmly, forcing her to pay attention. “You do not need to worry about it. It doesn’t concern you and it never did. I’m not protecting anybody, and that’s the end of it.”

He hopes his tone brokers no disagreement. Lydia, for now, can’t come up with anything.

“Make your call.”

  


* * *

  


The car radio flickers temperamentally and settles on an anodyne country-and-western station. Syrupy guitar chords. “ _He gets up before the dawn, packs a lunch and a thermos full of coffee…_ ”

Lydia rolls her eyes. Mike’s about to turn to the next station when he spots the car.

“You’re in lane for the airport,” Lydia reminds him.

“Yeah, I felt like taking a detour,” Mike says. “Keep your eyes forward. We’re being tailed.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Look in your mirror. Your eyes are better than mine, can you read that plate from here? The silver car.”

Lydia cranes her neck to read it, frowning.

“Looks like… 551-ACY-8,” she recites. “It’s either an eight or a three…”

“That’s good enough.”

“What do you mean? Who is this?”

“Chris called me early this morning, told me about a couple of guys parked up near your office. Cartel. Border plates. One silver car, one black.” Mike indicates the sign up ahead. “Now, is this exit going to take us right up to the passenger terminal, or can we get off before then?”

“You saw men from the cartel waiting outside _my office_ ,” Lydia repeats, her voice shaking.

“I didn’t tell you about it because I felt it would have been unwise,” Mike says calmly. “It would have intimidated you, which is exactly what they want. Keep me right, will you? I’d rather not drive straight through the airport if I can help it.”

He’s beginning to think they could have shaken the silver car when it threads back in behind him on a narrow ancillary road and nearly tailgates him, blocking the way he could have taken back to the nearest intersection. A second car swerves in front so that he’s forced to brake.

“Mike, what’s happening?”

“Quiet,” he tells her. They’re directed a few hundred yards down an ill-maintained private track in the shadow of a refinery. The nearby buildings, sparsely lit, are little but low dark masses against the pinkish sky. Lydia looks around in horror, the wide whites of her eyes reflecting the sodium light; the drivers are pulling up, cutting their engines.

“ _Mike_ —”

Both men have him at gunpoint already, and he has nothing to tell her. He unlocks the doors and climbs out, raising his hands. Instead of going for Lydia the men pull him away from the car first, both of them, shoving him to his knees and handcuffing him behind his back, and the muzzle of Garcia’s pistol hovers a few inches from his forehead.

Behind him, Lydia starts to scream. Weber hauls her out of the car, trying to cover her mouth; Mike’s last glimpse of her is white flashes of her face as she writhes. When she won’t stop struggling Weber twists one arm behind her back until her scream knifes upward into a piercing pained sound and then fades. Compliant, she buckles at the knees and he half-drags her into the space between two low buildings and out of sight.

“Mike!” she’s sobbing, although there’s nothing he can do, she must know there’s nothing he can do any more. “Mike, please, help…”

At this distance her cries carry further than anything else, but Mike can make out the scuffling sounds of feet skidding against concrete, someone being shoved into a wall. Weber shouts a command and Lydia screams one last time, too loud, a harsh ragged “ _no_!” right before the shot is fired.

“ _He says, 'Lord, I never complain, I never ask why'_ …” the song continues, bleeding out into the distant roar of the freeway. Mike puts Lydia out of his mind, turns his eyes away from his captor, and thinks of the last time he kissed Kaylee goodnight. Thinks she’ll be okay; kids are resilient.

Garcia seems to drop almost before the bullet pierces his chest, falling as if flung backwards, the gun knocked out of his hand and spinning away. A second shot cuts through the air at head height, and Mike gets as low to the ground as possible, realising all at once that for a few seconds Lydia had the darkness of the car to cover her, and that he never saw her take his revolver out of the glovebox, but she would have known he kept it there.

In case he’s wrong, he waits, but no more shots are fired. 

Mike strains to make out the skittering of quick, light footsteps and turns his head to see a flutter of movement in the gap between the buildings. Lydia steps out of the darkness and presses herself against the wall. She’s clutching the revolver in a shaky approximation of a Chapman stance with her finger hooked around the trigger, and the barrel twitches as she breathes. Her pale grey suit is stained dark all down one side. Mike sees the holster now, shoved into the gap in her waistband where he didn’t spot it before and Weber and Garcia didn’t either, where it would have been obvious in better light or worse luck.

“You wanna take your finger off the trigger for me?” Mike begins, when she’s close enough to hear him. Slow and calm.

Lydia looks down at the gun in her hand as if she doesn’t know how it came to be there, but slowly, she shifts her index finger from the trigger to the guard. She’s shaking all over. She looks like she barely knows where she is, let alone what’s in her line of fire.

“There you go. Now point the gun over to your right, then put it down.”

Lydia touches the muzzle to the ground and delicately lays the gun as far from herself as she can manage.

“Get the key out of the glove box,” Mike says, indicating his wrists.

The key slips out of her trembling fingers at first, but she unlocks the handcuffs on her third try and helps him up after he’s retrieved his keys and pistol from Garcia’s pockets.

“Are you hurt?” Mike asks her, trying to get her to look him in the eye. She hesitates, but shakes her head. Her hair just above her right temple is stiff with blood, as if there’s a cut there that she hasn’t felt yet.

“The other guy, is he dead?”

“Yes,” Lydia whispers. Her expression is numb and transfixed; she isn’t looking at him but at the body of Garcia, lying sprawled a few feet away. The man’s blood is welling out into a thin, wide pool. Lydia’s hand darts to her mouth, and she loses what little colour she has left.

“Snap out of it, Lydia,” says Mike, gripping her arm to get her attention. “Now, this oughta go without saying, but grabbing a gun like that when you don’t know what you’re doing is a very good way to get yourself killed. Is that understood?”

“Yes,” Lydia repeats, barely audible.

Mike sighs, looking around. He can hear a dog barking some way off, but no sirens yet; they’re too far out for anyone to have heard the commotion. “ _Underneath, underneath this Amarillo sky_ ,” the singer wails again, until Mike reaches back into the car and turns the damn thing off.

“Go on and sit in the—”

Before he can finish, Lydia pitches forward and crumples up at his feet, out cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics to “Amarillo Sky” by Big Kenny, John Rich, Rodney Clawson and Bart Pursley (2002).


	8. Single Points of Failure

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who's kept reading despite the lengthy gaps between updates. It's been a long process, but there's only one chapter still to come.
> 
> This story now has a [soundtrack](http://8tracks.com/sylvestris/the-river-answers).

Everything comes back in fragments. 

The first thing Lydia knows is that she’s lying on concrete with something soft against the back of her neck, and Mike’s crouching next to her, talking to someone on the phone, sounding very far away. She can’t see well enough to make out where they are. It’s a hot, airless night, but she feels feverishly cold, and nausea rises in her throat as soon as she tries to move. She could have lost a few seconds or a whole day; it’s impossible to tell.

“We ran into a bit of trouble on our way back,” Mike’s saying. “We got waylaid and taken out to La Porte; I guess her guys weren’t too happy with what she told them. All quiet now, but I’ve got two men on the ground, so I’m going to need your help cleaning up… no sign of anyone yet, but keep an eye out. …Eh, nothing too bad. She took a hard fall a few minutes ago, but she’s coming round. Shaken up, I guess.”

“Oh, God…” Lydia mutters, dragging a hand over her eyes. She doesn’t remember passing out, but Mike’s voice was dissolving away into static as she stared at the dead man bleeding out in front of her and she knew what was going to happen, it was just too late for her to say anything. All that time spent trying to convince him she can handle herself, and now this happens. A heavy wave of sickness rolls over her and she groans, trying to stay as still as possible. 

“Go a couple of miles down the parkway. There’ll be an access road off to your right,” Mike finishes, and snaps the phone shut. Lydia can feel him leaning over her, a heavy dark shape in her peripheral vision. As far as she can tell, they aren’t out in the open any more; he must have dragged or carried her into one of the open sheds for cover.

“Are you coming back to me?” 

There’s no hint of scorn in his voice. She’d expected scorn, somehow. _Get it together, Lydia_ , _for God’s sake_. Instead, he’s taken his jacket off and laid it under her head.

“Are they dead?” she asks, numbly, stupidly. Of course they’re dead; she knows that. She killed them. 

“Yeah, they’re dead,” Mike says, looking at her a little more closely. “Tell me you didn’t hit your head when you fell, ‘cause a concussion’s the last thing we need.”

“I’m fine,” Lydia says. Truthfully, she can’t tell. Nothing’s really started to hurt yet, and she’s too dizzy to think clearly. “Mike, we’ve… we’ve got to get out of here.”

She tries to prop herself up on her elbows, but her vision goes dark around the edges again and Mike gently pushes her back down before she can get very far. 

“Take it easy, will you? Until Chris gets here, we’re staying put.”

Lydia doesn’t know how he can say that when surely the police could descend on them any minute now, but she’s still seeing stars and her thoughts aren’t fully coherent yet. She’s half here and half back _there_ with the gun jolting painfully in her hands and Garcia’s blood on the ground shining like a pane of glass and the sense that she was slipping underwater as she blacked out, oxygen-starved and dreaming, and Weber twisting her arm so hard she was sure it would snap. She closes her eyes and tries not to retch at the thought.

Her heart is still beating. Kiira still has a mother. She’d shoot them again if she had to.

“How long was I out?”

“Long enough to worry me,” Mike says, although he sounds as cool as ever. “I would have grabbed you, but I turned around for a second and you’d hit the floor. Do you know where you are?”

“No,” Lydia murmurs, shaking her head. Does he expect her to? She’s been lost ever since they veered away from the interstate.

“Huh. Fair enough. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“You telling me I shouldn’t’ve taken the gun.”

Mike nods, seeming satisfied with that.

“You know, I told you you could have gotten yourself killed,” he says, some moments later. He measures out the words very carefully, as if this is her one chance to get a message he’s not going to repeat. “I didn’t say you shouldn’t have taken it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You wanna know what I make of those guys?” Mike says. “They were incautious, but they weren’t stupid. They pulled me out of the car first because that’s what you do when you’re trying to off an unarmed woman travelling with a bodyguard. You could have jumped out and started running and you wouldn’t have made it very far, not out in the open like that. Now the thing is, when I saw you come back out from there, you looked like you were out of your mind with shock, which means you weren’t in control of your weapon, and that makes you a danger to yourself as well as to me… but they weren’t expecting you to stand your ground. You made the right call.”

Lydia stares up at him, confused, but Mike’s looking past her and listening as a car draws close outside. The beams of its headlights catch the far wall and flash once before fading.

“That’ll be him. Give me your arm.”

Mike helps her sit up, steadying her as she rocks forward. She can see now that there’s blood all over her skirt, all over her jacket, right up to the shoulder. It’s soaked through her blouse just below the collar, and she can feel it on her skin.

“Mike,” she whispers, “what am I supposed to do about my clothes?”

He looks at her only briefly, so unfazed it’s surreal.

“I’ll find you something clean,” he says. “Can you stand?”

She can stand, barely, and then she feels incredibly light-headed. “Whoa, whoa, whoa… okay…” she mutters, trying not to fall forward. The words come out slurred.

“Lydia?”

Dimly, she feels Mike stoop to pull her arm over his shoulders and get a firm grip on her wrist.

“You don’t… need to…”

“Eh. Come on.” 

 

Lydia’s sure she should be panicking, but once the adrenaline starts to wear off, she’s so dazed that she can barely keep her eyes open. The journey passes in a haze. Lunar industrial lots and rhythmically spaced streetlights stream by. She lets Mike lead her back into the motel forecourt, up the concrete steps and into his room, thinking belatedly of security cameras and footprints and shell casings. He gets her to stand in the light and looks very intently into her eyes. He asks her something about where they are now, and repeats the question before she understands.

“You know, when you go all quiet like this, I get concerned.”

Lydia doesn’t know what he expects her to say. He’s taking care of everything. There must be a protocol for situations like this; that’s how he’s acting.

“What’s today’s date?” he presses.

“August seventeenth. Tuesday,” Lydia recites. The light is hurting her head. “Mike, I’m fine, please just let me clean up.”

Mike nods toward the bathroom and hands her a black bag. His hands are gloved now. Should she be wearing gloves? Should she touch anything? Where would they check for fingerprints?

“Clothes in there, if you would,” Mike says. “Shoes as well. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

Locked in the bathroom, Lydia doesn’t waste time taking inventory of her ruined clothes, just strips it all off and shoves it into the bag, everything except her watch and her earrings, and steps into the shower. The tiles are dull with soap residue and the floor can’t possibly be clean, but the water sluicing out of her hair has a rusty tint and after seeing that she tries not to look at anything, just scrubs herself with handfuls of lather until her hands feel raw.

When she glances at herself through the condensation on the mirror, she doesn’t look any different.

Well, it wasn’t Mike who told her years ago to tuck her keys into her fist when she walked home at night, and that if she was ever attacked she should go for the instep or the eyes or the backs of the knees, and never to let anyone force her into a car because once they get you into a car, it’s over. That was the theory and this is the practice. Her real fear was that with a man on top of her she’d freeze as in a nightmare and wouldn’t be able to fight back, but when the time came, it seemed clear what she had to do.

Her heart is still beating. Kiira still has a mother. She’d shoot them again if she had to.

 

“I don’t expect you’ll need it, but you’ll want to be able to account for where you’ve been the past eighteen hours,” Mike says, when she’s dressed. He came back with tennis shoes, a shift dress and a cardigan, then used the electric kettle to make some of the strongest tea she’s ever tasted. “Got any ideas?”

“Emergency room,” Lydia says. There’s a point to her thought, but her head is so hazy she can’t reach it. “They’d need some sort of a… a subpoena or a court order to prove I wasn’t there, right?”

“Mm. The whole time?”

“No, no… just the evening.”

“What about your car? It’s still at the office. How’d you get to Alvarez’s place?”

“I took a cab,” Lydia says. Mike waits for her to finish. “I paid in cash, that’s why it won’t be on the company accounts.”

She tries to drink her tea, but her hands are trembling so badly that it spills over her wrist. “ _Damn_ it,” she hisses, reaching for a tissue.

“Did you ever have to use a gun against someone before tonight?” Mike asks. “It’d shake anybody.”

 

* * *

 

> _Delores—_
> 
> _I passed out on my way out of the office last night & was taken to the ER at St Luke’s. Everything’s fine - they think it was just heat exhaustion - but after a long wait I have just now (4.35a.m.) returned and will be staying home today to rest. Please tell Kiira there’s nothing to worry about. Thank you again for your flexibility._
> 
> _Lydia_

 

“Delores said you were sick, Mommy,” says Kiira, her voice muffled, her face pressed into Lydia’s shoulder. Delores glances at her as if to say _what else could I tell her?_ Any minute now, someone from the office is going to call to tell her that Schuler’s dead. She slept for a couple of hours and woke up with her ears still ringing from the gunfire, and now Kiira doesn’t want to leave for kindergarten.

“Yeah,” says Lydia, “but I’m going to be just fine, okay? There’s no need to worry. I promise.”

Kiira frowns, biting her lip. This frightens her, the thought that Lydia is not invulnerable. _Children of preschool age may struggle to understand a parent’s anxiety and depression_ , she’s been told, but she can remember the feeling of being four or five years old and knowing something wasn’t right with her mother. There were afternoons when she just slept, probably tranquillised, under the slow ceiling fan in their white bedroom. Sometimes she’d brush Lydia’s hair to calm her or to calm herself, but her touch would always be hesitant, as if she was afraid of doing harm. Dad would only ever say that Mom wasn’t feeling well, and eventually that came to mean the most frightening thing in the world, the thing that would take her away from them forever, so Lydia can’t blame Kiira for growing up afraid.

“Everything should be back to normal soon,” she tells Delores on their way out, although she doesn’t think anything will ever be normal again. “I’ve got to fly out west one more time, but that should be it.”

 

She arrives in Albuquerque a day earlier than the rest of the Madrigal board, rents a car, and drives out of the city to a point marked on her map by its coordinates. She had imagined a furore, but there’s nothing to greet them here except the sound of the wind scouring the hills; no crowds, and no disgrace.

Gus had made plans, of course. Lydia had assumed he was at least nominally Catholic, but it turned out he came from a mixed background— some of his family had been German Lutherans— and without referring to religious observances he had been specific about what was to happen to him after his death, although the crematorium’s chapel was somewhere she couldn’t picture him ever being. She tried to imagine him there beside her and instead saw him dead and maimed with his face torn away from his skull. They’d warned her it would be bad when they led her into the morgue to identify his body, but what struck her most of all was how small and slight he looked, lying there covered only with a sheet. When she touched his hand, his skin felt like stone.

Now he’s been reduced to even less, to a weight in her hands and a printed line in the crematorium register. _Service for GUSTAVO FRING, 1956-2010_. She’d hesitated over the form they gave her when she realised she didn’t know his birth year and nor did Mike— the death certificate said March 1955 but he’d always thought it was ’56, he’d said— but in the end, Don Roberto had set her straight. Gus was born March 24 th, 1956, in the city of Arica. He spoke of some business with the family’s birth certificates having been destroyed in the 1970s by a father who didn’t want his children leaving the country, but Gus and Max had gone anyway, of course, travelling on bribes and forged papers all the way from Santiago to Panama City, and somewhere along the way the wrong date of birth was recorded and the story was changed. Perhaps several times.

It didn’t matter in the end, because he didn’t want a marker or a memorial. He only named a place, out of the way and above the treeline. It seems barren to her, but perhaps he found it beautiful. His ashes rise like incense smoke from the container in her hands, filtering into the harsh light, and then he’s gone.

 

The hotel elevators are keycard-activated, and due to some fault with their system Lydia ends up trapped in one on her way back to her room. When she calls for assistance, they tell her it’ll take a few minutes for someone to open the doors. Instead of panic she feels an almost irresistible urge to just lie down on the floor and _sleep_ and she would, too, if there wasn’t a camera on her. She hasn’t been this tired since Kiira was very young and fifteen-minute catnaps at her desk were the only thing getting her through the day. She nearly falls asleep on her feet waiting for the doors to open, falls asleep for long enough to dream in flashes of roads and mountains anyway, and startles awake thinking _if you’re lost, draw a map and figure out where you are._ It hardly makes sense, but it’s a straw she can grasp.

Back in her room, she spreads a stack of blank index cards across her bed and arranges them in a rough grid, grouped by location ( _TX, NM, Europe, Mexico_ ). The obvious place to start is with all the people on the payroll who knew her, so having labelled twelve cards for Chow and Dennis and Ron and the drivers and the security personnel and a thirteenth for Tyrus, she moves on to Gale Boetticher and the second chemist (chemists? there was talk of an assistant) and everyone else who was on the payroll and might have known of her, and then to all her contacts in Germany and the Czech Republic and their associates, and then to everyone in Mexico from the dock workers in Manzanillo to the mules in Matamoros, and then to all the third parties, the restaurant workers, the laundry workers, the cab drivers, the hotel receptionists and concierges and doormen and the staff at the Museum of Fine Art where that benefit was held in 2005 and her colleagues and the medical investigators and the crematorium attendants and the bystanders and anyone else who might, if called upon to testify, remember enough to corroborate the kind of claims that could be made against her if just a fragment of evidence comes up. When she runs out of cards, she tears sheets of hotel notepaper in half. When she’s covered as much of the bed as she can reach and the papers start spilling over onto the floor, she marks each one with a number to make sure she won’t leave any behind.

She annotates the cards with dates and place names and transactions and points of concern. To _Chris Mara_ she adds _outside Casa Tranquila during explosion. target for questioning? suspect?_ then  _Attempted to call on 8/2/10_ which also belongs on the cards for Dennis, Mike and Tyrus. _VISUAL_ is scrawled in highlighter on all the cards corresponding to people who could positively identify her in court. Some of them remain blank, and she wonders what she could be missing. Some are covered front and back with writing. Mike’s card is so densely overwritten it becomes illegible. She has to be thorough; she has to think about this the way the detectives will. In the end, it could all come down to a single phone call she didn’t know was being recorded, or metadata linking her to one of the thousands of records she interfered with, or a few frames of surveillance footage showing her somewhere she couldn’t account for being or with someone she couldn’t account for knowing. If they ever dust for fingerprints in Mike’s car, they will find hers. If they find her clothes— Mike never did say that they would be burned— it would be easy enough for them to trace that suit back to the store where it was not only purchased but altered, and then find her name and specifications in their tailors’ books. Not even Gus could stay out of sight forever. She’s certain that somewhere in her sprawling map is the identity of the person who killed him and if she just looks hard enough she’ll find them, but there are just too many names, too many possibilities, and she looks and looks until she’s lost herself.

Lydia gathers up all but twelve of the cards into thin bundles, checks their numbers, hides them in one of the zipped compartments in her suitcase, and sits down on the edge of the bed to contemplate the names she has left. She arranges them in alphabetical order, then chronologically by date of first contact, then in some kind of hierarchy based on how great a risk they seem, then randomly in three rows of four. She stares at them until her vision blurs. 

Afternoon has drifted unnoticed into evening. The screen of her cellphone glows bright and blue in the dim light when she picks it up.

“It’s me,” she tells Mike. “I… I’m in town. There’s something I think we should talk about.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Not over the phone.”

Mike can tell she’s hesitating, so he waits in silence. She could tell him it’s nothing. She could back out, go home, and keep her head down like he told her to. She could curl up like a weakened animal playing dead and wait for the consequences to come to her.

“I need to see you.”


	9. Words and Guns

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a lot of dialogue from "Madrigal", which inclusion is a choice I didn't make lightly - the last thing I want to do is pass off Vince Gilligan's writing as my own. In the end, I erred on the side of including the scene, as the chapter felt incomplete without it.

“I’ve got a daughter,” Mike lies, sitting at a run-down bar about a hundred miles north of Houston, watching the ice cubes swim in the last of his second whiskey. Ray Charles is playing over a muted weather forecast on a poorly registered television set, which is showing a loop of isobars moving like a sea creature across a garish green slice of South Texas, their colours bleeding with the indicated pressure or heat. The bartender, a heavily freckled fiftysomething woman who’s been chatting to him as though he’s the only customer she’s had acknowledge her all night, swipes condensation from the counter as he lifts his glass and the dog-eared coaster underneath it.

“Oh, yeah? Does she live down here?”

“Houston,” he allows, though he’s seeing Stacey in his head, Stacey and Kaylee back in New Mexico, in the first house they had when they moved, the one with the peeling paint and the dried-up yard. Now they’re in a better neighborhood and there’s more green around the house, and Stacey’s rent has just gone up by three hundred dollars. She told Mike this in passing as if it was no big deal and assured him they could handle it, but he could see her worrying at it like a sore tooth. They’ve already cut her hours at work once this year, but they wouldn’t let her go, she said, with the hardness she’s had to build up since Matt, but he understands it’s always a matter of _if. As long as. Provided that._ It’s tenuous. Mike knew that every last laundered cent he gave her could be seized, could taint everything she owned, but he had to believe that the cops would never come to her door again; and he could see clearly enough to know that he wasn’t going to be around when Kaylee turned eighteen. So he slipped her another envelope of cash, and she was wise enough to take it without asking any questions, and the next day the feds seized Kaylee’s fund anyway, and the day after that he had to take two of his own men down to the river with their bodies taped up in plastic and weighed down with bricks because Lydia’s finally cracked, and tomorrow he’s going to have to do the same to her.

“My son lives down in Texas City,” the bartender offers, polishing glasses with quick, jerky hands and setting them back down on a shelf behind the counter. In the scratched mirror they seem to crowd and jostle their reflections. “I only moved up here ‘cause it was making me sick. All the chemicals, I mean. Petroleum. VOCs. There’s no getting away from ‘em, they’re cooked right into the ground. I did twenty-five years in the refineries and then I started getting sick, and that was that.”

Mike nods. Ray Charles has bowed out and now Leonard Cohen is drifting through “Suzanne”, of which he half-remembers the verse about Jesus ministering to the sailors. In its tone it seems out of place down here, where _JESUS IS LORD_ adorns the wooden wall of a furniture store and small signs on corrugated plastic flutter at the edges of the road, advertising local evangelical churches in print too small to take in. All you get as a driver is the impression of it all, the polite reminder that services happen on Sundays still, that the churches are still there, though they don’t always look like churches now, and he doubts they would give any quarter to the dreamy mysticism of Suzanne and her lover there. Beneath all the preachers’ exaltations lies the bedrock certainty of Hell.

“I didn’t use to believe in it myself,” she continues. In the mirror, Mike can see a man in a long-billed trucker’s cap set down his drink and make a little fuss over dabbing spilled beer off the tabletop before wandering off toward the restrooms. “I mean, if you start telling people down there that their plant’s what’s making you sick… _ha!_ ” She shakes the dishtowel with a snap and folds it. “They don’t want to hear it. I told my doctor, “you’ve got to tell me what’s wrong, ‘cause I can’t sleep, I can’t go to work, my joints hurt so bad I can’t hardly pick up a pen any more”, and he didn’t want to hear it either. He gave me Vicodin, and that barely even touched the pain. He gave me antidepressants and I don’t know what all else. In the end there was nothing I could do but sell my house and come out here.”

“Did it help?”

Contemplative, she taps a few bars of the song with the fingers of one hand. “I would say I’m eighty per cent, eighty-five per cent back to what I was. I’ve told my son they should move too, but he likes the city too much. You know, I pray to God my grandkids stay healthy but you can’t get away from the chemicals down there. You can’t breathe without tasting the oil. I said to him last month, “think about that rig that blew up, just wait until that hits you, it’ll kill every bird on the shore, or what’s left of them…”, but he won’t listen to me.”

The TV screen is flaring with the pinkish red of another weather warning and Leonard Cohen is singing about a half-crazy woman in rags and feathers, turning her mirror onto the water. There was something more than usually restless about Lydia when he met her at Loyola’s. As soon as she started to speak he could feel it in his palms like a static charge when the air goes sour before a storm. Something unhealthy. The longer he drove, the more he thought about it, the wearier he got.

“Anything else I can get for you?” the woman asks. She’s old and smart enough not to lay it on too thick; she insinuates just enough to let Mike picture those quick hands darting under the counter and slipping a teenth into his palm, probably cheap local crank, nothing like what Fring used to sell but strong enough to keep a trucker sharp for the next few hundred miles. If he didn’t know better he’d wonder what exactly kept Lydia wound so tight, but she never would have been hired if she had a habit. It’s just how she comes; she’s clean, clean through and through with money to burn. Scared of chemicals. The bayous of Houston are black like open pits at night and they move as slow as glaciers, silt-choked, a tangle of snakes.

“No, thank you,” Mike says, looking her in the eye. “Excuse me.”

In the men’s room, the man in the cap hands him a crumpled grocery bag. With gloved hands, Mike lifts out the pistol and checks the space where the serial number should be.

“It’s clean, sir,” the man says, unnecessarily, and sniffs. He’s younger than he looked at first, and his jeans are dark in two spots with the sweat of his palms.

“That’s what I’m paying you for.”

“So’s the silencer.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Well, uh, did we say sixteen hundred?” he asks, shifting from one foot to the other. Mike counts out the notes, wondering which of them will get busted first, this kid or Barbara out front. She had decent-looking teeth; him not so much.

Something falls into place in his mind that night, as if shaken loose after thirty-odd years. Gordie’s wife’s name was Mary Ann. Mary Ann Schoelkopf. A Dutch girl. Her skinny limbs were slumped at wrong angles as they stepped around her, Mike and his partner and the ambulance men, and there was so much blood on the floor that it rippled like mercury with the vibrations of their footsteps. One of the detectives had joked about the case, not long afterwards. Mike doesn’t remember what the man said but he remembers punching him, hard and quick as a flash, earning deep bruises on his knuckles and a strongly worded caution from his C.O. He’d thought maybe whatever it was that made men kill their wives was something that could be beaten out of them. By the time the bruises had healed, Mary Ann was in the ground and he knew better.

What he does when he gets to Houston will have to be quick and clean.

 

* * *

For the first time in nearly a month, none of the messages in Lydia’s inbox have anything to do with the Pollos investigation. No one’s talking to her about Gus any more, not since she came back from Albuquerque. _Yes, there was a private service_ , she said when they asked, though that was stretching the truth. She detected a tasteless fascination with it all, the lurid details of his death and subsequent exposure. As far as she’s concerned his life didn’t come to an end in the explosion but weeks later, on that quiet, treeless hillside, on his own careful terms.

Since then, matters have escalated beyond her control. She has committed one hundred and thirty thousand dollars to self-preservation. She’ll have to have Chris come to Houston— she doesn’t intend to set foot in Albuquerque ever again— and either hand over the money herself or set up some kind of dead drop, bury it somewhere in the ground. She doesn’t own any tools. She would have to buy a shovel. She knows that detectives catch criminals by pulling closed-circuit footage from Home Depot and watching them buy things like shovels and rope and masks. She doesn’t look like someone who would need to dig a hole. Her hands are too soft. 

She still jumps when someone knocks at her door, but not as badly as she would have done without half an Ativan in her system. The other half was what got her through that meeting at the DEA. She’d imagined that at any moment someone was going to halt the proceedings and swoop in with her arrest warrant, pin her to the conference table as they cuffed her wrists behind her back while her colleagues looked on.

She combs through her schedule again in case any appointments are yet to be deleted, but finds only one. She and Gus were both meant to attend a reception at the Museum of Fine Art on October 23rd— _Cosmopolitan Routes: Houston Collects Latin American Art_ —  and she wonders if they’ll still expect her presence there. She supposes that that was only what he did for twenty years, after all: move gracefully from one hollow place to the next, never giving anything of himself away. Gus had soft hands, too. He used to wash his hands like a surgeon. Lydia’s wondered if whoever set the fire at the lab after he died was acting on his orders. He was willing to burn the whole world down to get what he wanted, after all. Sometimes she thinks that whoever killed him might have been doing him a favour.

She only wishes Mike had listened to her. Mike had seemed like the safest person in the world after Gus, and then he had looked up from her list and she had understood that she wasn’t his to protect, and never would be. _I want you to feel safe_ , Gus had told her. She’s trying.

She’s never understood why people use meth. She imagines it must feel like the last few seconds before an aneurysm.

 

* * *

Breaking into Lydia’s house is much easier than she probably thinks it is. What he didn’t expect to find was that her bedroom was built almost as an extension of the hallway, accessible from both sides without any actual doors. It makes his next task straightforward: as she rounds the corner he grasps her all at once, left arm around her back, left hand clamped over her mouth and the tip of the suppressor at her temple. He’s briefly distracted by the bodily memory of carrying her into that shed a week ago, when she was a slack weight in his arms, white all the way to the lips, her pulse weak to the touch; now she’s so very alive. In this position he can easily feel the sparrow’s-wing flutter of her heart, and her breath is hot in the blunt trap of his hand. She doesn’t even try to scream; she knows her time is up.

“Do whatever it takes to keep them out of here, or they die,” he tells her, just to make sure, and lowers his hand at her nod. 

“Delores, I’m going to take a bath,” Lydia calls, sounding strained, but barely. She’s playing along. Mike can feel each word vibrate in her throat. “Put Kiira to bed and go on home. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Really, you don’t want me to wait for you?” comes the nanny’s voice, growing clearer and closer. Mike wills her to take the child and go; he’d expected to have Lydia on the right side of a closed door by now. If she takes two more steps forward, he’ll have to shoot Lydia where she stands then get the other two in the hallway, before they know what’s happening.

“No, you go on,” Lydia cuts in. “Thank you.”

“Mommy?” the little girl calls, straying from her nanny’s side. _God help me_ , Mike thinks. “Are you going to come say good night to me?”

She must only be a few feet away. She has a thin little green shoot of a voice; her footsteps barely make a sound. Mike gets ready to do the worst thing he’s ever done.

“Yeah, honey. After Mommy takes a bath.”

Kiira turns back, pacified. Lydia has gone deathly still.

“Okay. Love you.”

As he shoves Lydia toward the bed, she moves like an automaton, not an ounce of resistance left in her. Her eyes, turned up toward him and gleaming with tears, reflect light from the houses across the street, the glow from the hall. She stares at the gun, then at him. She looks very small.

“Don’t hurt my daughter,” she says, in a tone he’s never heard before.

“I won’t have to, unless you scream,” Mike tells her. “You know why I’m here?”

She nods. He can’t make out any shame in her expression, nor any desperation.

“What are you waiting for?”

“The nanny to leave.”

Mike remembers their faces, sometimes, but none of the people he’s killed ever looked at him in quite the way Lydia is looking at him now. Like she’s been condemned for a long time and is ready for the bullet.

“If you have anything to say to me, now’s the time,” he says, against his better judgment. Usually, this is over in a matter of seconds. It’s a brief struggle and the shot ends it. Something weak and fearful in him wishes, _wishes_ she would scream, just to force his hand. 

She stays quiet as stone.

“Two good men died because of you,” he presses, keeping her in his sights.

“Don’t shoot me in the face,” Lydia says, softly. “Please. I don’t want my daughter seeing me like that.”

“Your daughter won’t see you.”

“Yes, she will. She’ll find me. She never once sleeps through the night.”

“Nobody’s going to find you, Lydia,” Mike says, and it’s like striking flint. Something changes in her face; her features animate with a new fear. She’s not so pliant now. 

“Wait. What? No… no,” she stammers, her breath quickening. “She has to find me. She has to find me.”

“Lower your voice,” Mike warns her, thinking desperately of the little girl. _She never once sleeps through the night_. She’s a nervous type, like her mother. She hears noises and gets out of bed to see what’s happening. The situation is slipping out of his grasp. One false move by either of them and everything will fall apart.

“She has to find me,” Lydia repeats, pathetic, unyielding. “She has to find me.”

“You want your five-year-old daughter stumbling across your dead body?”

“I can’t disappear. She has to know I didn’t leave her. She has to know that.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“I don’t care what you do,” Lydia says, and _this_ he recognises, this stubborn, righteous, deadly fury. “I’ll scream, and I’ll keep screaming— my daughter’s not thinking I abandoned her!”

For an instant, a flash, Mike means to pull the trigger, but the impulse dies faster than his nerves can carry his intent, and then the door alarm chimes. Lydia heard it too. She chokes back a sob, dreadfully loud in the stillness.

“Shut up,” Mike says, as loudly as he dares, “and _calm down_.”

“I don’t care. You have to promise. You have to promise me.”

It dawns on him that this isn’t a new fear, after all. None of his background checks ever did tell him what happened to Lydia’s mother; none of the records ever yielded a date of death. 

“Promise me I don’t disappear.”

He could, if he’d anticipated anything like this, have brought with him a vial of sodium thiopental. He could have talked her through it. _It’ll look like no one was ever here. Like you lay down for a rest and your heart just stopped._ _No,_ _it won’t hurt. But I’ve got to trust you not to struggle. If you do, I’m ending it quickly._

Lydia’s not pleading any more. She sits very still. Her head is bowed towards him, and her scalp shows white where her hair is parted, neat as schoolgirls used to wear it. If he’d had a daughter… he thinks, and tries to kill the thought.

All at once, he knows he can’t do it. It’s more weight than he can bear.

“Can you still get your hands on methylamine?” Mike asks.

Lydia doesn’t move. Mike wants to shake her, and at the same time wants not to touch her at all, in case his hands should end up around her neck. 

“Methylamine, Lydia,” Mike growls, forcing her to look at him. “Can you still get it?”

Slowly, Lydia meets his eyes. Tears mark her cheeks in two bright lines. She looks very small, and very tired.

“Maybe,” she says, her voice broken. “Why?”

“The DEA found our offshore accounts,” Mike says. “Where my guys’ hazard pay was coming from. I need to make them whole. I’ve got a crew who can make back what we’ve lost, but they need precursor.”

“How long will it take them?”

“Lydia, yes or no.”

“I’ll do it,” Lydia whispers. “I’ll get you what you need.”

Keeping the gun trained on her, Mike takes his finger off the trigger.

“Can I trust you not to call the police or anything stupid like that?”

“Yes.”

“You know what’ll happen if you do.”

“I know.”

They’ve done enough; they’ve both done enough. Mike wants nothing so much as to leave, leave this house, the little girl unhurt, as safe as if he’d saved her, and go in search of something better than this; he wants to freeze this moment in glass so that nothing worse can happen from here on out and no one else will have to die. _God help me._ All he can do instead is let Lydia live, and watch her carefully enough that she won’t be tempted to strike out again, and do what it takes to make his men whole, and accept the consequences as they come.

“Stay right where you are,” he says. Lydia nods, her eyes still fixed on his. Watching her, he has an odd, fleeting sense of something almost like grace, a light brightness that quickly ebbs away. “Count to thirty.”

 

* * *

Inhale, exhale, _one_ , inhale, exhale, _two_ , inhale, exhale, _three_ , inhale, exhale, _four_ , her chest hurts, _five_ , inhale, exhale, _six_ , she’s okay, she's okay, she's fine, everything's fine, _seven_ , he had a gun in the house he had a gun _eight_ he grabbed her he was going to shoot

Inhale, slowly, exhale, _one_ , that's it, that's better, _two_ , slowly, exhale, _three_

When she gets up, the house is full of a loud, thick silence. Nothing has been disturbed; nothing is out of place. It’s as if the worst thing in the world didn’t nearly happen here. When her mother went missing, there was chaos. There were police cars and flashing lights and strangers crowding into their home, checking all the doors and windows, taking photographs and asking impossible questions, and her father had held onto her the whole time, as if afraid that someone might try to take her too. Now all she can make out is the clipped crack of her own footsteps on the polished hardwood, the soft hum of the air conditioning, a clock ticking half as fast as her heartbeat.

Lydia turns on all the lights.

She’ll buy a gun, she thinks. A gun wouldn’t have saved her. She imagines walking out of the house, tracking Mike down, and killing him with her bare hands. She imagines kneeling at his feet and begging him for forgiveness. She imagines taking his gun, putting it between his eyes and making him plead for his life. _No one hurts my daughter. Do you understand? No one._

“Honey, come here,” she says, kneeling softly on the foot of Kiira’s bed and opening her arms. “Come here. That’s right.”

If not for Kiira, they wouldn’t be here, either of them. Kiira would be back in the foster home and Lydia would have died comfortably and willingly at Mike’s hands; she would have turned soft and gentle in the line of fire because what else would there have been left to do? What else is there? Kiira sniffles and sobs, her face hot and creased, uncomprehending, and Lydia tries to envelop her. _You’re still here. You’re still here._

“Mommy, why are you so sad?”

“Oh, no, sweetie,” Lydia chokes out. “No. I’m not sad. I just love you so very much.”

Kiira is crying into her cardigan and Lydia shuts her eyes tight and holds her as close as she can, sick with guilt. She can’t even begin to keep the tears back; her throat has gone raw, her face is contorted, her mouth is set wide in a silent howl.

“I’m sorry,” she mouths, over and over, stroking her daughter’s hair with shaking hands. “I’m so sorry. Forgive me. I’m so sorry.”

She cries herself into a blinding headache as Kiira falls asleep, then carries her to her own bedroom, stuffed animal and security blanket in hand. Kiira stretches out by her side, unharmed and untouched, scarcely stirring as Lydia finds a damp washcloth and dabs the tears away from her face. Her hand curls reflexively around Lydia’s in her sleep. She is perfectly secure in all that she doesn’t know. 

Lydia draws the covers over them both and stares at the wall where Mike stood, willing herself not to see him there, repeating under her breath whatever she can think of that might get her through the night. _Just another few months, that’s all it’s going to take. Just another few months and then it’s over. No one’s going to hurt us, my darling, I love you so much. It’ll be just like before, and when it’s time for us to run, I’ll know. I’ll know._

As she loses herself in sleep, the cicadas outside are singing again, in endless waves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's finally finished. I want to thank everyone who's read this story, especially those readers who stuck with it despite my lengthy gaps between updates (I avoided ever posting "don't worry, I swear I'm going to finish this eventually" in case that would jinx it), and everyone who commented- I can't express how valuable and encouraging your comments were.


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